How I survived the “Big Bitch” (25-to-Life) and the death of my Angel. I wasn’t a street thug. I was an engineer who operated on the wrong side of the law. I machined the serial numbers off my .25 Browning with a mill, not a file. I built custom nets to fish cash out of…
Tag: Mary Ellen DeSantis
THE ARCHIVES: INSIDE THE LIFE “You can’t understand the man until you understand the world that made him.” Most people think the Mob was just New York and Chicago. They think it was just Tommy guns and cannoli. They’re wrong.The real war was fought in the Rust Belt. It was fought in the “neutral zones”…
Asphalt & Alleys: The Lay of the Land The Offices, The Battlegrounds, and The Cages. This is the map of “The Life.” The concrete and steel backdrop where it all went down. Erie, Pennsylvania: The Neutral Zone On the surface, it was “quiet little Erie,” just a sleepy waterfront town. But that was the…
Rogues Gallery Jimmy “JR” Russell: The Mentor “If you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it right.” The man who started it all. A legend in Lackawanna and Erie, JR was an original “OG” who spent 27 of his 57 years in prison because he refused to rat. He was a chess master in a…
One Man Crime Spree The true story of the “Secret Seven,” the last of the Goodfellas, and the Kid who survived the crash. In 1985, Judge Penny Wolfgang looked over her glasses in the New York State Supreme Court, thumbed through a two-inch thick FBI jacket, and told me I better have brought my toothbrush.…