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We offer stats and an update on our latest book about Frank Gangi
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The cover of our first and only ebook, available on Amazon.com for $4.99 (ebook) and $6.50 (print). Click image to find on Amazon.

Mob Interest Highest Ever

We offer the stats no other blogger would dare.

I trust my newsletter subscribers. Nothing is more important to a blogger than the folks who offer their emails per a newsletter effort. In return, I'd like to share some proprietary data that has me quite excited.

I have not been writing newsletters as frequently as I want to; I have a lot on my plate right now and one of my New Year's resolutions is to focus more time and energy in developing this newsletter.

If you punch in the term "Mafia news" in a Google search, Cosa Nostra News will be found as the number one listing (it's legit; in other words, I am not purchasing that placement: Google pushed me to the top for that search term and many other keywords.)

The reason I like to think is that I have stayed ahead of Google in important ways. I knew from the beginning that the "sneaky petes"--and I refer to major corporations here who use a bastardized version of "content marketing" (in other words, use tricks aside from ad buying to win high search ranking on Google. They did this mainly through keyword stuffing and "link tricks" too complicated to explain here. As an example, if I were to follow the keyword-stuffing practice, every sentence on my blog would have Mafia News or Cosa Nostra News in it more than once.

You may have heard of Google's notorious Penguin updates - that was the name of Google's most recent "correction" to whack out all the sneaky petes. Companies hired SEO specialists and consultants to get them out of the fix in which they found themselves this past year (some companies saw their entire online portfolios evaporate overnight), when all they needed to do was hire me for a fraction of the cost! LOL!

They key is simple: Write compelling copy that your readers want to read. Write well informed stories. In other words: stop posting lots of crap all the time. Write real stories that mean something, maybe offer something new. Keyword stuffing breaks so many rules of basic writing, foremost among them being the law that says avoid repetition; repetition is LAZY ASS WRITING.

As per my quest to obtain new and exclusive content, I have been working with Dominick Cicale -- and have been taking some flack from a few loudmouths who don't know how many people actually read my blog.

My blog has seen huge growth year to year. I like to think that this is a combination of my writing better, and more, content, as well as there being a rising surge in interest in all things Mafia related.

What do I mean by huge growth? How about this (comparing the past 30 days to the same period last year):

Sessions were up
175.11%
Users (unique monthly visitors)
112.16%
Pageviews (total of pageviews viewed by Users are up):
200.64%
 
Pages per each Session
9.28%
Avg. Session Duration
11.77%
Bounce Rate - number of people who split after viewing one page - you want this number as low as possible)
-40.43%
 


Most bloggers won't have the guts to show you this data, which I copied and pasted straight out of Google Analytics.

In terms of where my audience is geographically, the largest percentage comes from New York City (all five boroughs). If you own a local store in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx or Manhattan, I could give you major exposure. My readers are mostly males in their 40s and 50s, the most affluent consumer category there is. (Okay, that was one of two "plugs" in here!)

I know this can be viewed as self-serving crap -- but my point is that I am getting some key exposure and a lot of guys from "the Life" as they call Mafiadom are contacting me to write their stories.

I finished The Cicale Files Volume One: Inside the Last Great Mafia Empire. I am extremely proud of the sales of that book. We've sold hundreds of copies and are indeed still on that Kindle true crime best seller list, today at number 12. The majority of people who self publish on Kindle are lucky if they see any sales whatsoever. People want to joke and write phony reviews (we have two bad reviews, one of them had been a four-star review but the "critic" suddenly changed it under the impression that my loudest critic was correct. I might add that critic, I now believe to a moral certainty, secretly runs a competing blog and today requested my Facebook friendship. He previously had blocked me. As I continue to say: Some guys are so far behind, they actually think they are in the lead....did I make that up? Seriously! Did any of you hear of that phrase before???)

The ebook is bulletproof in terms of facts (except for one mistake which I am correcting in the second edition of the ebook; it is already corrected in the print book. I incorrectly put Christy Tick and Tom Mix in the wrong crime family!

As for Facebook and Twitter, etc., I don't even need to promo on those platforms. I get my traffic from organic searches and from loyal readers who bookmark my site.

Dominick Cicale has complete control over his information: court transcripts, wiretap recordings, etc. We do have the makings to put out some explosive ebooks. I think I am winning Dom over in terms of getting him to allow me to use the material. One day I see us finishing a full-length bio, backed up with his documentation, some time in 2015.

Now, I wanted to inform you of my latest project. I am writing another ebook based on Frank Gangi's life.

Frank Gangi is best known for the three years of his life he spent in hell; he was with Thomas "Tommy Karate" Pitera, a mobster who would've been a serial killer if he hadn't become a made man. Frank comes from Mob Royalty: his uncle is Rossi Gangi, a powerful Genovese capo who once owned the Fulton Fish Market, among many other things.

For two months, I spoke to Frank for hours a day. He told me everything -- the full blown story, including precise details of all five murders he was involved with thanks to Tommy Karate.

I also spoke to some of the women in Frank's life. One of them worked in a Brooklyn bar frequented by wiseguys and wannabes back in the 1980s.

This is what she had to say about Frank and Tommy:

"Frank was gorgeous – he was funny – he was thoughtful, he never involved me in that part of his life.
 
I met Tommy – he was the first one in the door, wearing a suit, with a briefcase. His first stop was a drink on a Friday night. I honestly thought he was a businessman who took the train out to Brooklyn from Manhattan.
 
I always thought he was nobody to fear with that girly voice.
 
Frank when he left the fish market -- with the history of his family (many members were in the mob; his father was murdered by a psychotic Mafia hit man and one of Frank's cousins was even the person on whom the mobster in the film "The French Connection" was based), I thought he was trying to prove himself and make a name for himself.
 
It was all about money and drugs too.
 
He thought Tommy was the way back in [to the mob]. Frank wanted it so bad – but getting high and drunk was more important."

 

Here is one of my most-read stories about Mr. Pitera. I am hoping to finish the Gangi ebook (tentative title: The Frank Gangi Story) in early 2015.

Let me wish you all a Happy New Year before I post it because I have to run out and do some errands at 11pm at night (always fun!) Please, enjoy..... you may have nightmares, but who knows.... It could be worse!
 

Bonanno Mobster Pitera More Serial Killer than Goodfella


A widely reported Mafia incident from a few weeks back would seem to merit deeper reflection. Blink and you would've missed it. A hit man from the mob's recent past, who came from the crime family that we can thank for "Mob Wives," and who calls to mind the workings of a violent earlier crew known as the murder machine, tried once again to get out of prison, where he will likely spend the rest of his life.

The media widely reported how Thomas "Tommy Karate" Pitera, serving life, had a motion crushed in his face -- from beyond the grave in the sense that the jurist who penned the related legal documents allowing the denial of the motion is dead.

As Forbes reported: "A federal court of appeals yesterday denied a criminal defendant’s Motion To Compel Post-Conviction Relief in the form of DNA testing of six items related to the crimes at issue.

"The defendant/appellant, Thomas Pitera, alleges that genetic testing of those items would exonerate him by showing that the guilty party was in fact Frank Gangi, whom the court determined to be his accomplice. In United States v. Pitera (2d Cir. Apr. 3, 2012), the Second Circuit determined after very careful analysis that under the standards established by the Innocence Protection Act (“Act”), any such testing would not raise a reasonable probability that Pitera did not commit the gruesome murders in question in furtherance of a criminal enterprise."

Pitera, already 20 years into his sentence, has seemingly made seeking "post-trial relief," an interesting term, that one, his life's work, considering he has several times tried to acquire it, failing, obviously, with every attempt.

Pitera is not among your more widely known mobsters, and if not for a Philip Carlo book and an episode of Mobsters, it is likely only close readers of New York tabloids and Jerry Capeci's Ganglandnews.com site would likely even know who this guy is.

For those who don't fall in the above category, here is a little recap of Tommy Karate: Thomas "Tommy Karate" E. Pitera (born December 2, 1954) was a member of the Bonanno crime family -- the same one that has been in the headlines thanks to the sitcom --er, reality TV show -- "Mob Wives." Renee's father, Anthony "TG" Graziano, who as is well known now, was taken down, along with quite a few other Bonannos, and maybe a Gambino or two, by Hector Pagan, who was a steady character on "Mob Wives" owing to his status as TG's own little guy and Renee's ex-husband.

But Tommy Karate's arrest and crimes will never in any way become fodder for reality TV (or a sitcom) owing to his reputation for being a fiendish, bloodthirsty homicidal maniac having more in common with Roy DeMeo -- even Jason Vorhees and Michael Meyers -- than mafiosi like TG and even Joe Massino, "The Last Don" who became an informant when faced with a sentence that could include a sojourn in the death house. Pitera is in the minority of American Cosa Nostra in that he derived pleasure from torture, killing and his body-disposal method, which mimicked in many ways the DeMeo crew's "Gemini method."

He is suspected by law enforcement of as many as 60 murders. His nickname is derived from his love of martial arts, including karate -- a skill which he learned at a young age and practiced with great skill for the rest of his mob life. Pitera's love of being able to defend himself with his hands likely had more to do with insecurity stemming from years of being bested by high school bullies than from any desire having to do with competition or athleticism.

Also fueling the insecurity: "He had a particularly high pitched effeminate falsetto voice that was compared by biographer Philip Carlo to Michael Jackson's but having even more falsetto. Mob associate Frank Gangi thought Pitera sounded more like Mickey Mouse or Minnie Mouse," Wikipedia writes.

According to Carlo, Pitera, whatever his motivation, took martial arts very seriously, spending more than two years training in Tokyo under one Hiroshi Masumi. During this time in Japan, he even grew his hair long to emulate his hero, Bruce Lee.

After returning from Japan, Pitera hooked up as an associate with the Bonannos and quickly evolved into one of the most feared connected guys on the streets, made or not.

Pitera belonged to a family faction headed by captains Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera and Philip Giaccone, the three capos who ended up murdered in the infamous basement triple-whacking planned out by Massino and Dominick Napolitano, who were protecting themselves as well the family's imprisoned boss, Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, with full commission approval to "defend yourselves," as then-Gambino boss Paul Castellano informed Joe Massino win Massino sought out his approval.

During the 1980s Pitera became a made man with the Bonannos for Anthony Spero, who put him with Frank Lino (a survivor of the three-capo takedown, quick thinking enough to sprint out of the basement room before a bullet could find him).

It is alleged in the Carlo book that Pitera shot to death Wilfred "Willie Boy" Johnson as he walked to his car. Johnson had been a close associate of Gambino crime boss John Gotti since the days when the two of them had been petty burglars and thieves. The two men indeed were very close. But in 1985, Gotti discovered that Johnson had been a government informant since 1966. Pitera murdered Johnson as a favor to Gotti (who at the time was close friends with then-Bonanno boss Joe Massino, who would later claim that Gotti wanted him, Massino, dead, but that is another story).

Spero's notoriously violent Bath Beach crew was involved in extortion, loan sharking, drug dealing and murders. Pitera's crew in particular was known for robbing drug dealers and then reselling their drugs. Pitera even had the cojones to murder Colombian drug kingpins for the ability to resell their cocaine. And in a scene that could've been taken out of "Murder Machine" the book about the DeMeo crew, Pitera once killed a Middle-Eastern drug supplier right in his own Brooklyn apartment, then stripped the body, sliced it into pieces in the bathtub and buried it in a secret dumping ground.

"Investigators eventually found six of Pitera's victims in a mob graveyard in Staten Island near the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. Pitera had decapitated the bodies and buried the heads separately to impede their identification using dental records," Wikipedia writes, using the Carlo book for backup.

"Pitera's approach to murder and body disposal was cold-hearted and clinical. He used the Staten Island graveyard because he believed that the damp soil would accelerate decomposition. Pitera studied books on dissection and carried a special tool kit for cutting up bodies. He always insisted on burying corpses deep enough so that police dogs could not locate their scents. Before burying body parts, Pitera either wrapped them in plastic or placed them in suitcases. Pitera's one weakness was that he enjoyed keeping jewelry and other souvenirs of his work. This went beyond Mafia culture and was classic serial killer behavior [emphasis added]."

On June 4, 1990, Pitera was indicted for drug dealing and involvement in seven murders, including the 1988 Johnson murder, although as noted investigators have alleged that Pitera probably committed about 60 murders. In Pitera's apartment, Carlo has reported, FBI agents discovered more than 60 automatic weapons as well as knives and swords, and literature such as The Hitman's Handbook.

One of Pitera's crew members, Frank Gangi, the nephew of Genovese crime family capo Rosario Gangi, decided to testify against Pitera. Frank had been arrested for driving under the influence and while sitting in the holding cell, apparently stricken by guilt, decided to confess to all the murders he was involved in with Pitera, providing information on many Pitera murders.

Gangi described how Pitera had even murdered Gangi's girlfriend Phyllis Burdi, then cut Burdi's corpse into pieces in the bathroom. Her crime: She may have been "responsible" for the overdose death of Pitera's own girlfriend, a drug addict who certainly didn't need help. Look at her taste in men.

On June 25, 1992, Pitera was convicted of murdering six people and supervising a massive drug dealing operation in Brooklyn. (Pitera was acquitted in the Johnson murder.) In October 1992, Judge Reena Raggi sentenced him to life in prison, saying, "Mr. Pitera, nobody deserves to die as these people died." 

As of April 2012, Pitera is serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary (USP) Allenwood, in Pennsylvania. Pitera's inmate number is 29465-053, according to the Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator, his attempts to spring himself on technicalities notwithstanding. Although should he and his lawyers ever become successful...
 
 
 
 
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