stagwhiskey

Organized crime is all but faded in cleveland.

One of Clevelands last old time wiseguys has passed away.

What are they waiting on with Frank?

Looks like Dimora is going to die in prison. While Frank Russo is out of prison until when?

I have written a lot about organized crime in Cleveland and ran a website about it. I have much, much more material than I could ever use in a book. And some of it I will never publish because the information is still current -- that is, the crimes may still be ongoing. I walked away from that life because it was getting too crazy and this was when a close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I'd lost the heart for it. Here's some of what I can tell you.... Some of my sources went to Dimora indirectly for favors such as for getting a license, a court case fixed, or other "service". Sometimes they would to go to judges directly -- and if you want to find corruption that's a good place to look! Sources would go to friends of theirs who would then go to Dimora and tell him what they needed. Dimora would deliver. He wasn't a mobster. He was go-fer. A tool. And he is not the only one, but he was the least afraid of getting caught. You can say he either had balls or was careless. Either way you'd be right. But he's not the only one in town. Many, many politicians have zero moral compass, so when someone comes along flashing money at them, they're only too happy to oblige and not ask questions. I think FitzGerald is clean. He and I had lunch downtown when he learned about my website, as he wanted to learn who were some of the organized crime players here. He recently moved here from Chicago and elected to Lakewood City Council. I've talked with him about other things since, and I feel he's clean. But there are other elected officials who may not be at any and all levels of government. I can tell you a little tidbit that came from a source for the website I once ran and for articles I've written that Dimora was given a "shot across the bow" by people who worked (and still work) for one of Dimora's neighbors. That warning was that they would pay for his legal defense, that he should keep his mouth shut and that if he did he wouldn't have to worry about a thing. Now, for those of us living on the outside of the world that Dimora was living in, what he was told would mean only that his sugar daddies would pay for a top-notch legal defense. But, for those living inside the world Dimora chose to be a part of, he was told to keep his mouth shut about various activities that truly mattered to them, or else his life and possibly those of people he cared about was over. The county is a big government, and so are many municipal, regional, state and federal governments. Even if most of the top elected officials aren't plugged in right now, some surely are. But moreso many of the bureaucrats are in great positions to be corrupted. Stop fighting the last war against crime. Try fighting the next one. If you were in control of others engaged in criminal activities, where would you seek to earn the most money with the least exposure? I can tell that you one of the most brilliant criminal enterprises I was notified about is a workman's comp scam where the mob-run labor union, the mob-owned employer, the mob-owned clinic and some key bureaucrats and elected officials were involved (including the then-governor who was the beneficiary of a lavish fundraiser in Little Italy). Considering who owned the participants, there was no way this was going to get exposed -- except that the corrupt, managing physician was screwed over when the the whole scam was being set up. They forged his name to documents and when he complained, he got a call at dawn from a man he knew had committed some murders. The murderer said something innocent to him like "I haven't heard from you in a long time and I wondered if everything was all right." But when a known murderer calls you out of the blue at 6 a.m., that's when you realize you f*cked up. Even though that was 13 years ago, the last I'd heard, this scam or something similar is still continuing. They were making millions of dollars per year in phony workmen's comp and medicaid claims. And it all looked totally legit from the outside. Or there's other scams, like forcing bars in some cities to accept their vending machines. So why those bars? Because they're run by immigrants or people who are convicted felons yet have liquor licenses listed illegally in the names of their relatives, making them vulnerable to coercion. And why those cities? Probably because the mayor or the police chief is being paid to look the other way. The family who ran that scam were convicted felons and had their Hunting Valley house built by a tough SOB and convicted felon who lived in Macedonia with a private airstrip so he could fly back and forth to his quarries on Kelly's Island. It was the only house I've ever heard of built by this guy. And he was buddies with Dimora's neighbors. They were all seen meeting at various times at the Macedonia man's club in Valley View, with the same people who had offered Dimora legal representation/veiled threats. There are other linkages but I can't cite them from memory right now. And then there's after-hours clubs where gambling and prostitution goes on. Or there bar- or web-based gambling, shylocks, escorts and, of course, drugs, guns and stolen cars. By the way, speaking of stolen cars, one of my sources would receive cars stolen here and drive them to the East Coast to meet with their "colleagues" so they could be sold. Or his attorney would file claims with an airline, dealing only with an employee who was related to another criminal friend of my source, that his suitcase with lots of expensive suits was lost by the airline. So he got paid for the "loss." Another source of mine ran a crew of burglars who only targeted the homes of drug dealers, and why not? The drug dealers couldn't go to the police. They wouldn't even report the crimes to police. And these burglars were bad asses who weren't afraid of anyone. Yet another source worked in a crew where they ran drugs and extorted protection money from immigrant businesses. They paid off cops and politicians to look the other way. This source was trying to set his life straight after his new wife had a kid; he wanted to clear his conscience by telling me things he done. There was one incident in particular. He felt terrible about helping to beat up a Chinese man who owned a shop in Euclid or Wickliffe. One of his crew members used a baseball bat on the Chinese man when he refused to pay protection money. The shop owner's wife was there when he was assaulted, and my source said he never saw so much blood after the shop owner's skull was cracked. These punks were in a crew run by a mobster who answered to another mobster who answered to one of Dimora's neighbors. I'll end by saying that this answering ended with Dimora's neighbor who appeared to run Dimora. Do you believe that Rosemary Vinci died of natural causes? I'd be amazed if Dimora believed it too, and I'm sure that affected his decision to keep quiet. I had interviewed Rosemary a few times after she had called me to defend various nuisance bars or corrupt politicians she was connected with. She had a big mouth and love to tell stories. So did her late father James who was executed in his restaurant, Diamond Jim's. Rosemary told me a few weeks before she died that she just started dating a man from Sicily, but she refused to give me his name. She said he was something special, and bragged that he drove a Mercedes. I wanted to go by her house on Duck Island and run his car's license plate number, but I never did. To show you how one's mind works from being around some of these characters for a while, you start to question otherwise innocent things. Perhaps this man was simply Rosemary's last great love? Or perhaps something else was at work? I developed a paranoid way of thinking during my years of research into organized crime, always questioning what might otherwise seem innocent. But that's not why I highly doubt that the characters who ran things while Dimora and Russo were in office will suddenly behave themselves now that Dimora and Russo have decided to keep their mouths shut and go off to prison quietly. They won't behave themselves because they don't know how to earn an honest living, they believe in their view of "pure capitalism" and they get a thrill from living the way they do. But many in that world remember that Cleveland's Underboss Angelo Lonardo, one of the most respected mafioso in the U.S. in the early 80s, went quietly to prison on a 100-year sentence. After a few years in prison, he decided he didn't want to die there and became a top echelon FBI informant, bringing down wiseguys nationwide. Dimora's neighbors remember their history. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a prison fight and one or both of them were killed. I know my history too, as Clevelander Alfred Calabrese was killed in prison in 1999 by a fellow Clevelander incarcerated in the Atlanta federal pen. Some of Allie's friends suspected that then-boss Joe Iacobacci had Allie killed for some past offenses. Just remember, organized crime has only gotten stronger, more global and more ethnically diverse. As long as there is money to be made, it will never go away. It just takes new forms, and we haven't imagined those new forms it will take or has already taken in Cleveland yet. We will find out, probably after the fact. Always keep your eyes open for it. You may find it in the darndest of places. why would you mention Iacobacci but leave the other names out? So the same people killed rosemary and her father?