Convicted skyjacker Martin J. McNally, told me the story of his attempted prison break. He said that a young woman named Robin Oswald attempted to hijack a plane and force the release of McNally and Gordon Trapnell. Mac had nothing to do with this attempt, except he was invited to go along by Trapnell. In
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Ken Eto or Tokyo Joe was an unusual dude in the world of the Sicilian Chicago Outfit. The only Japanese American to be in any position of trust with the Chicago Outfit or any other family. He was Japanese-American born in 1919. In 1942 the feds placed his entire family in a Japanese Internment Camp.
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Dean O’Banion was born on July 8th, 1892 in Maroa Illinois. His father, Charles O’Banion was an Irish Immigrant. Charles was a house painter and took his family to Chicago and lived in a neighborhood known as Kilbubbin. Like Hell’s Kitchen in New York, it was called Little Hell because of its poverty and crime.
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John “Brother John” Lazia (spelled Lazio on the tombstone) was born in New York in 1895. He dropped out of high school in the eighth grade. By 1915, Lazia had moved to Kansas City. Lazia’s first known arrest was in 1916, after robbing a man on the street. In an exchange of gunfire, Lazia was
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Your host Gary Jenkins tells the little-known story about the time when Nick Civella ordered a moratorium on all skimming activities from the Tropicana casino. During the fall of 1978, Nick Kansas City Mob boss Civella became obsessed that one of his inside men at the Tropicana was stealing from the skim. A Sicilian immigrant
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The .22 Caliber Killings: Inside the Mafia’s Infiltration of Two FBI Field Offices During the post War period to 1968, the FBI and a few local police department Intelligence Units made liberal use of extrajudicial hidden microphones and wiretaps. In 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. This statute
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Gangland Wire 2021 I wish all you guys a Happy and Prosperous 2022. Like everybody else, I feel like I just lost a year and more. The podcast kept me going and all of your emails, comments on the Gangland Wire Facebook page and the website, your emails, and every other way you sent me
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Gary interviews Steve St. John about an interesting character Steve met in prison. Stephen Blumberg once lived off a $72,000 annual family trust fund. But, he helped a dark secret compulsion that will send him to prison more than once. Blumberg started as a child removing doorknobs and stained glass windows from the old houses
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Witness Protection Failed The story of John T. Ambrose Merry Christmas Wiretappers. I am here in the studio alone today, and while noodling around, I found an interesting Chicago Outfit story that I had never heard. A U.S. Marshall named John Ambrose was assigned to help protect a government witness named Nick Calabrese. He revealed
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Dominic Taddeo and the Rochester Crime Family Venmo me @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup click here Gary and his regular contributor Mob author and historian Camillius Robison discuss this obscure but important mob figure,
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