Kiddy network Nickleodeon will premiere Nicky Deuce on May 27 which "centers on
Nicholas Borelli II, a.k.a. Nicky Deuce, a nerdy teen who finds
himself in Brooklyn with a mobster uncle he never knew he
had after his plans to attend math camp go awry" as reported by The Huffington Post.
The film casts several actors from The Sopranos, and last year Nickelodeon executive Majorie Cohn said "having the Sopranos actors adds a level of authenticity and fun" as then reported by Martin Chilton for The Telegraph. Among the tv show's alumni who appear in the upcoming flick is Tony Sirico who was convicted on a 1970 gun charge after allegedly harassing John Addison who operated the gay club The Together.
The Italian American ONE VOICE Coalition is calling for a boycott of Nicky Deuce, and president Manny Alfano says "these trash-television purveyors now want to brainwash a new generation
with this insidious and hurtful stereotype of Italian Americans" as reported by Suburban News.
Frankly, it's hard to accept the mob genre as an appropriate subject for a kiddy network to explore give the long history of child exploitation by the Mafia.
What's next for Nickleodeon? A movie about Mike Umbers and Ed Murphy who pimped out underage boys for the Gambino and Genovese crime families? Or maybe an expose on the child porn racket operated by Gambino capo Robert DiBernardo? Perhaps Nickleodeon can next tell the story about the Sicilian mobsters who kidnapped 11-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo, and then after torturing the boy for two years finally killed him and dissolved his body in acid? How about a series on pedophile mobsters like Genovese capo Salvatore Granello or Outfit crew boss Jimmy Allegretti?
No doubt Nicky Deuce is nothing but white-washed comedic entertainment about the Mafia. To flip a phrase from Majorie Cohn the movie is less about "authenticity" and more about "fun." However, given the harm which the Mafia has perpetrated against children, portraying it as anything but pure evil perhaps is the real fault with Nicky Deuce.
The Mafia is a degenerate organization which exploits human misery for criminal profit, and even children are not beyond the reach of its dirty hands. For decades the Mafia has been the principal producer and distributor of kiddie porn, and according to recently released FBI documents among the key figures in this racket was Gambino capo Robert DiBernardo who was a top lieutenant to family boss Paul Castellano. The pair would meet each Friday at Castellano's Staten Island mansion to gloat how filthy rich they were getting from their ungodly alliance.
In 1986 federal postal inspectors discovered cartons of magazines seemingly depicting underage boys "engaged in sexually explicit conduct" at smut shops in Times Square and Greenwich Village which allegedly were distributed by DiBernardo, and during a subsequent March 1986 raid on DiBernardo's office seized alleged "child pornography and financial records." As "a result of the Postal Inspectors seizures [a federal prosecutor] is attempting to indict DiBernardo on child pornography violations" according to an FBI memo dated May 20, 1986. Since at least 1979 DiBernardo was "a well known pornography distributor also dealing in child pornography" according to a July 28, 1981 FBI document. Indeed, the FBI's New York field office had been monitoring DiBernardo's role in the smut trade since 1968 when he was arrested by the NYPD on his first obscenity charge for distributing a porno mag entitled Young Stuff which, of course, was later dismissed.
Among those who may have supplied DiBernardo with material was Michael Umbers who was a suspected front for a Gambino gay bar or two on Christopher Street during the 1970s. The Gambino family through reputed soldiers Eddie DeCurtis and Paul DiBella allegedly had silent interests in a number of Greenwich Village gay bars. In addition to running gay bars Umbers produced boy-on-boy porn. For example, a Dec. 23, 1971 article by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice states that "a couple of years ago, Umbers was arrested along with two other men and indicted on charges related to violation of the state obscenity law":
According to an official assigned to the case, the men conspired to conduct a pornography operation soliciting young boys of 16 and under. They'd have them participate in 'deviate sexual acts' which they’d film and distribute. Umbers procured the kids.
Unfortunately, the feds were precluded by intervening events from indicting DiBernardo on the child pornography charges. In a power play for control over the Gambino family John Gotti whacked Castellano on December 16, 1985, and only months later whacked DiBernardo on June 5, 1986. A September 22, 1986 article ("Gotti OKd Hit On Porn Czar Rival") by Philip Messing for the New York Post states:
[DiBernardo's] alleged involvement with porn had nothing to do with his death, law enforcement authorities say. Instead, DiBernardo is thought to have been slain after he sought to fill a slot in the family hierarchy left by the April 14 mob execution of Frank DeCicco.
Indeed, according to FBI sources Gotti had no intention of giving up the crime family's interests in the smut trade after DiBernardo's death. For example, in April 1987 an informant told the FBI that "Gotti realizes the enormous profits to be made in the pornography industry and will certainly not be turning his back on a possibility of sharing in these profits," and Gotti recently had visited Florida to meet some "pornography dealers aligned with the Gambino family."
Of course, notwithstanding his suspected heinous crimes DiBernardo wasn't all bad. The Gambino capo was a well-liked little league coach in the community. No word on whether any of his players ever became any of his models.
Several years ago a two-bit self-admitted mob associate whom I knew in New York City allegedly arranged a murder-for-hire against me.
The individual had been employed as a barback in gay bars which he claimed were run by the Mafia, and later became involved with a supposedly mobbed-up tranny brothel which advertised in the back pages of The Village Voice. Indeed, I have documents establishing his expressly-acknowledged "off the books" employment ("$25 plus 15% of the tips" a night, and "a dollar off all drinks when I'm off duty") in 1997 at two specifically-named downtown gay watering holes which presumably involved violations of the tax and labor laws, and an April 13, 1997 letter by him which reveals a "fantasy" which hopefully always remained no more than that:
I do not understand certain things about myself -- for instance -- I like working at my sleep-away camp and I enjoy working with the kids. But I always feel uncomfortable around them when an authority figure is around. Its like I'm afraid that the authorities are gonna think that I'm some kinda pervert. But that is just me projecting my thoughts onto others. I don't know why but I think deep down I think I'm a perv. But I would never do anything to hurt a child -- I don't even have the desire. I think the youngest age I'd be attracted to is 14. But thats just like fantasy.
(Curiously, "would," "never" and "but" are among the "eight words that most liars use" according to lie detection expert Janine Driver.)
I had known him on and off during the late 1990s and into 2001 or 2002 but broke off contact after becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his gradual descent into the dark underbelly of gay culture. Apparently, my decision to cut him out of my life and my knowledge of his self-described mobbed-up livelihood was a combination which apparently drove him mad enough to want me dead.
For a couple of years I faced only intermittent harassment which I generally ignored although once or twice I filed a complaint with the NYPD when his behavior got out of hand. Eventually the harassment escalated to the point that it allegedly had infected my place of employment at Milberg Weiss -- a politically well-connected plaintiffs' class action law firm which was then having its own problems with federal prosecutors -- and resulted in the murder-for-hire contract.
I learned about the alleged plot from a class action lawyer from Chicago, IL who had invited me out to dinner on one of his business trips to New York City in February 2006. He uncomfortably told me over dinner on Feb. 22 that the threat had taken root about a year earlier, and since had been squashed through the intervention of a NYC class action lawyer with whom I was friendly.
Even though my life apparently had been saved I was livid upon learning the news, and wanted to bring the case to law enforcement. Indeed, on Feb. 26 I fired off an email to the attorney who had informed of the supposed plot in which I stated "wherever Andrew James Roffman is today -- his [alleged] mafia connections notwithstanding -- I hope that the feds get him." However, when I broached the topic with the lawyer who supposedly intervened on my behalf I was told in no uncertain terms to keep quiet. Indeed, his law partner who had self-admitted ties to the proverbial old neighborhood stated: "The mob may no longer own complete precincts but they still own some cops and prosecutors, and you can't just tell them f*ck you."
When I was stewing about the events to another attorney from the plaintiffs' class action bar he replied back to me in a May 24, 2006 email: "My choice is for you to walk away from this and I hope you stick to that path." He later warned me that if I took any legal action against the individual who allegedly put out the contract on my life he and those protecting him would make stuff up against me in a countersuit: "Making something up...yes that could happen because people do sh*t."
Frankly, I never understood why so many people seemingly wanted to protect an individual who allegedly took steps to see me dead, and I only can presume that he must have something on someone.
Geraldine Ferraro, the Queens, NY democrat who made women's history in 1984 by running as the vice presidential candidate on loser Walter Mondale's ticket, died yesterday at 75 as reported by Douglas Martin for The New York Times:
Some said the choice of the little-known Ms. Ferraro had been a desperate move to attract the female vote in a daunting election year. Compounding the campaign's woes was a barrage of questions about the Ferraro family finances — often carrying insinuations about ties to organized crime — that not only blemished Ms. Ferraro's stature as the first Italian-American national candidate but also diverted attention from other issues. * * * Her inability to escape questions about her finances was partly brought on by her husband's [John Zaccaro] initial refusal to release his tax returns. She riled Italian-Americans when she explained, “If you're married to an Italian man, you know what it's like.” * * * Evidence also emerged that organized-crime figures had contributed to her campaigns. When a House ethics panel investigated her financial disclosures, it came out that one of Mr. Zaccaro’s companies had rented two floors of a building to a pornography distributor.
Mr. DiBernardo, who was slain in 1986 at the behest of the Gambino family boss John Gotti, headed the Star Distributing Company, which law-enforcement officials identified as a major pornography supplier operating out of a building co-owned by Mr. Zaccaro and managed by his real estate brokerage, P. Zaccaro Inc., in lower Manhattan. Ms. Ferraro, an officer in the real-estate business, has said she and her husband were unaware of the tenant's business until news reports brought it to light during her 1984 Vice-Presidential campaign. She promised then to evict the Star concern, but the company remained three more years despite what Ms. Ferraro said were efforts to oust it.
The Gambino crime family traditionally has been involved in the production and distribution of pornography in the United States, and at the time DiBernardo was whacked the FBI was investigating his suspected major role in kiddie porn.
During the 1984 campaign Ferraro learned that her father Dominick Ferraro, who died in 1944 when Geraldine was only eight years old, was involved in the rackets. Dominick was a night club operator in Newburgh, NY who lost his liquor license in 1941 after employing B-girls to scam customers to buy drinks, and was arrested in 1944 for running a numbers game but died of a heart attack on the day he was due in court. Geraldine's mother Antonetta also had been charged with Dominick in the gambling racket but the charges against her were dismissed with the passing of her husband.
Ferraro's husband Zaccaro "pleaded guilty in 1985 to a misdemeanor charge of scheming to defraud in connection with obtaining financing for the purchase of five apartment buildings," and "two years later he was acquitted of trying to extort a bribe from a cable television company" as reported by The Associated Press.
In response to Zaccaro's 1985 guilty plea Ferraro in a statement "linked her husband's troubles to what she termed her 'historic candidacy,'" and "she said he had committed a 'judgmental error' in trying to help a client" as reported by Ralph Blumenthal for The New York Times. And after Zaccaro's 1987 acquittal Ferraro "broke into tears when she heard the verdict" as reported by George James for The New York Times: "'You have no idea what it's been like,' she said later. 'We want to get on with the rest of our lives.'"
Joe Coffey, a former commanding officer of the New York Police Department's organized crime unit, and Michael Franzese, a former capo with the Colombo crime family, have been all over CNN expressing their shock that the indictment earlier this week against suspected Gambino crime family members and associates included not only prostitution charges but allegedly involved the exploitation of teen girls as young as 15. For example, Coffey told CNN: "The mob as we know it historically holds very few things sacred, but they do hold women and children sacred." The guys need a refresher course in mob history.
The involvement of the Mafia in the vice rackets has been widely known ever since Thomas Dewey nailed Lucky Luciano in 1936 for controlling the largest prostitution ring uncovered in American history, and reached its culmination during the 1970s and 1980s when New York City's crime families controlled the sex industry in Times Square which included gay bars catering to chicken hawks, prostitution rings exploiting teenage runaway girls and smut shops where child pornography was ubiquitous. Robert DiBernardo, the Gambino capo who was whacked in 1986, was the biggest pornographer in the United States, and at the time of his death was under federal investigation for kiddie porn.
The mob's sexual exploitation of underage boys has been a racket in NYC since 1900. For example, in Gay New York:Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994), Yale Professor George Chauncey writes:
The Italian neighborhood of the Lower East Side had numerous saloons where fairies gathered interspersed among the saloons where female prostitutes worked.In 1908, Vito Lorenzo's saloon, located at 207 Canal Street (near Baxter), was charged by the police with being a "fairy place."In 1901, agents conducting a systematic survey of "vice conditions" on the Lower East Side found male prostitutes working at two Italian saloons on the block of Elizabeth Street between Hester and Grand, the same block where the Hotel Zaza's manager hired rooms to female prostitutes who stood at the windows in "loose dresses and call[ed] the men upstairs."One investigator noted that the Union Hall saloon was crowded with old Italian men and several young fairies on the night of March 5; a few doors up the street, at 97 Elizabeth, stood a saloon where the fairies, aged fourteen to sixteen, could "do their business right in [the] backroom."A month later the same saloon was said to have "5 boys known as [finocchio, or fairies] about 17 to 25 years of age."
During the 1960s and 1970s Genovese associate Ed "the Skull" Murphy and Gambino associate Mike Umbers -- longtime figures in the gay bar industry who now are dead -- were involved in running boy prostitution rings. For example, a July 22, 1971 article ("Christopher's emperor: Mike Umbers") by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice states:
A week ago last Monday, Mike Umbers sat on the deck of his Gay Dogs on Chistopher Street, a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand, a Lark in the other, and talked about prostitution and pornography and real estate – and himself. Late Thursday, Christopher's End, his heavily patronized all-male after-hours bar, was raided, and cleared for the night for ABC Liquor violations. Sunday morning, 4 a.m., the place was raided again, this time by the feds as well as city cops. Two of Mike's employees were arrested and charged with failure to have the $56 federal tax stamps required for retail liquor dealers. Mike, who was not on the premises, escaped arrest. Mike's three big operations are Christopher's End, when it's open, the Studio Book Store, and Gay Dogs. All right-out exploitative. Mike calls himself a gay catalyst and flesh peddler. He deals in boy-boy sex. He describes Mark Lithko, his publishing house, as a means to produce paper flesh that his Studio Book Store peddles. Gay Dogs is cruising flesh. And Christopher's End, with its backroom and nude boy shows, is climax flesh. Mike is also rumored to have his finger in the controversial Stonewall Inn. It was boarded up June 27, 1969, and won’t be re-opened until a liquor license is issued. Negotiations have been going on for several months. Right now, the second floor of the two-story Stonewall is occupied by a bevy of young men. * * * The July 18 raid on Christopher's End was one of nine that took place on after-hours bars that night. The Daily News labels the raids "a move to cut off one of organized crime's sources of income, estimated at $2 million annually from nine after-hours clubs alone." * * * And the fed at Christopher's End figures this is just small pickings in the overall big syndicate scheme. * * * "I have gay businesses and I employ gay people. I started this whole empire myself, and I'm doing more for the gay community than any organization." I wonder what Mike means by "any organization." Is he talking about gay liberation?
A Dec. 23, 1971 article ("The After-Hours 28: Greetings from the feds") by Arthur Bell for The Village Voice states that "a couple of years ago, Umbers was arrested along with two other men and indicted on charges related to violation of the state obscenity law": "According to an official assigned to the case, the men conspired to conduct a pornography operation soliciting young boys of 16 and under. They'd have them participate in 'deviate sexual acts' which they’d film and distribute. Umbers procured the kids."
With respect to Ed "the Skull" Murphy who was involved with various gay bars allegedly tied to the Genovese and Gambino crime families during the 1960s, historian David Carter writes in his 2004 book Stonewall:
Beyond Murphy's involvement in the Stonewall Inn and in blackmailing gay men, he was deeply involved in male prostitution. Chuck Shaheen, who had a very high regard for Murphy, told Martin Duberman, "I knew Eddie Murphy for a long time. . . .He was into young boys. Most definitely. And he was very, very involved with the procurement of young boys." Danny Garvin recalls how he would "always see these hustlers hanging out with [Murphy]. He had connections,and these hustler kids would hang out with him." Tommy explains why the Mafia would operate the Tenth of Always as an ice-cream parlor in terms of Murphy's predilections: "The Tenth of Always had a kind of particular feeling, that you knew you were there because Murphy liked chicken. In there I felt like I was in some surreal Catholic Youth Organization dance, because everybody was like my age or younger, and the drag queens just looked like regular high-school girls, and the hustlers looked like regular high-school boys. And then it really looked crazy because everyone was sitting, sipping these sodas, and it was like – there’s no word to describe – it wasn't a brothel, a bawdyhouse, or whatever. It was like the pickings of johns: that's what it was set up for." Bob Kohler, who hated Murphy passionately, cited as evidence of Murphy's loathsomeness that he paid the youths he pimped with counterfeit money.
Some of Murphy's young charges allegedly did not fare well, and Carter further writes: "The suspicion that Murphy was involved in the murders of youths goes back at least to the early sixties.Stephen van Cline recalls, for example, that Murphy had been involved with the early 1960s waterfront gay bar called Dirty Dick's, where, he says, a number of young men were seen for the last time." According to one eyewitness in the late 1960s a Puerto Rican youth known as Tano with whom Murphy was sexually involved was kidnapped right off the streets never to be seen again as recounted by Carter in Stonewall.
In 1975 the NYDA and NYPD initiated an investigation dubbed Operation Together which, among other things, was looking into mob-controlled underage boy sex rings but just as law enforcement was prepared to seek indictments the investigation inexplicably was shut down in 1977 over the objections of the investigating ADA and two detectives assigned to the case. R. Thomas Collins Jr., a former Daily News reporter, writes about the shut down of Operation Together in his 2002 memoir Newswalker:
For 18 months a team of as many as 56 investigators from homicide, vice, narcotics, and intelligence worked under the command of the department's Organized Crime Control Bureau. In all, Operation Together made dozens of arrests for dope peddling, prostitution and other morals charges, and attempted bribery of police. The strategy of the investigation was to target people involved in gay bars, nab them on narcotics charges and get them to turn on their mob controllers, partners or extortionists. Among the depravity unearthed by this team was a network of chicken hawks—patrons of child prostitution and kiddie porn—as well as mob control of the gay bar scene. Then suddenly, just as members of Operation Together felt they were getting close to making investigative breakthroughs, the plug was pulled. The task force was broken up; detectives, undercover officers and the assistant Manhattan district attorneys were reassigned. When a couple of plainclothes guys protested, they were given uniformed foot patrol. One Midtown pimps and pros expert was sent to Harlem. There was bad blood among the police. Cops I spoke to believed the worst, that the mob had pulled strings inside the NYPD and gotten the investigation killed. That's what they suspected; fearing that whoever committed these murders would get away with it.
A July 27, 1982 article by the Associated Press reported that investigator Dale Smith, who worked for the New York State Senate's Select Committee on Crime, said "organized crime in New York" was running a six-city boy prostitution network – Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, Washington and Houston – with the "male prostitutes between the ages of 13 and 16 . . .shuttled between the cities."
The Mafia continued to dominate Times Square well into the 1980s, and among the mobsters who had a role in the neighborhood was reputed Genovese capo Matty Ianniello -- convicted in 1985 for a skimming operation involving several of his gay bars -- who allegedly was behind the hustler bar Hay Market at 772 Eighth Avenue according to court documents. With respect to this particular establishment R. Thomas Collins Jr. writes:
The crowds were at the gay bars, which cops told me the mobsters opened in a cynical attempt to attract a clientele from an underserved market. I got to the Hay Market, at 772 8th Ave. just before midnight. The bar was five deep with men and boys hustling, talking, laughing—and drinking. Lots of drinking. The air was thick with cigaret smoke. The jukebox played loud pounding rock music. Patrons moved unselfconsciously to the beat. The bar was long and thin, with a shelf of liquor lined against the back wall. Against the opposite wall hustlers were seated against a railing, some of the boys looking as young as 15. One was staring into space, his thin frame covered with a faded denim jacket, scruffy jeans and black boots. Several of the men from the bar across the way were watching. Several of the boys wore varsity jackets with leather sleeves. Others had shiny plastic jackets. They were all working. One of the men at the bar in his early twenties wore an elegant camel's-hair jacket, black pants and silk ascot. A portly, balding man in a business suit sat next to him. He wore rimless glasses and could have passed for an accountant at any midtown office. Another boy came up to the balding man and whispered in his ear. Two stools down, a handsome man smiled at the mirror. Behind him stood a goon wearing a T-shirt with barbells stenciled on front, with the sleeves rolled up. His arms were folded across his chest and he flexed his biceps. In the doorway, a young boy with a woolen stocking cap blocked the way, forcing everyone who came in or walked out to ask him to move.
And Bruce Benderson, author of User, writes the following about the Hay Market for 3am Literature:
Don't believe the hype about the infamous Stonewall bar being an oppressive place where sad homosexuals had to hide from police oppression and where Mafia bosses exploited their desperation. Any illegal bar run by the Mafia always has the hottest, most inspiring atmosphere. And excitement, risk and underground activity are what makes the best writing. The Mafia may have created a lot of heartache in our cities, but we owe them a debt for having created such good illicit bars, which were at the basis of a lot of good American literature. As for me, I probably wouldn't have written a decent sentence if I hadn't discovered Times Square and the hot Puerto Rican hustlers who came down from the South Bronx to frequent its mostly Mafia-owned bars. * * * The first and most famous Times Square bar I ever went to was called the Haymarket. It was a big, sprawling place on Eighth Avenue with cheap drinks, a long bar counter, booths you could sit in and a big pool table. In those days, a lot of the hustlers were poor white kids. Since the minimum drinking age in those days was 18 (rather than today's 21), there was some very young trade in there. The place was pulsing with young testosterone and horny old men willing to spend the $20 on some fresh meat.
Remember when the mob used to contend that it was not involved in the narcotics trade? That myth was exposed when Vito Genovese was put away in 1959 for trafficking heroin through his Greenwich Village and East Village gay bars. And if the current allegations made by the feds bear out in court, then the conventional wisdom that the Mafia is not involved in the prostitution racket or the exploitation of children may turn out to have been just another myth.
Indeed, Henry Hill, the former Lucchese crime family associate who was portrayed by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, is not so surprised by the allegations as reported by Emanuella Grinberg for CNN:
Hill calls the allegations business as usual for the mob. "There is no line that they draw, as far as luring underage girls, teen prostitution," Hill said in an interview Wednesday. "Most of those guys do not have consciences; they'll do anything, and they'll go to any length to make an illegal dollar as long as they don't have to use the sweat of their brow." * * * In his time, Hill said that child prostitution was a big enough taboo to be off limits for the Lucchese family. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen then, or especially now. "There's a lot of people in organized crime, a lot of bosses, families, that don't condone it. But some do, and they don't care what they have to do to make a buck," he said.
