Who Was Who filling up

The revised Who Was Who section is growing rapidly. There are about 90 biographies online at this time, ranging alphabetically from Accardo to Licata. More are being added daily. The Who Was Who entries are accessible through the main menu (mafiahistory.us) "People" selection. They can also be accessed directly through http://mob-who.blogspot.com/ .

Some redesigned pages online

Some of the redesigned pages of the American Mafia website ( mafiahistory.us ) have come online. These include the main entrance page, the articles menu page, the Who Was Who menu page, the crimefighters menu page, several articles and about 70 Who Was Who entries.

Visitors are cautioned that the site remains under construction. Not all links will work. Some links are connected to old-style pages.

Many of the old pages contain out of date or incorrect information. These include the original Who Was Who biographies of mob figures that have been indexed by major search engines. While this transition continues, whenever possible, visitors should make an effort to obtain the new pages from the site.

Who Was Who database grows

The American Mafia history website's Who Was Who database continues to grow. There are 41 crime and law enforcement bios in the database at this moment, and more are being added daily. The database will be tied into the website shortly. Until then, the entries can be accessed through:
http://mob-who.blogspot.com/

Who Was Who coming online

The American Mafia history website's Who Was Who biographies are slowly coming online in a new location. While they will remain accessible from the main onewal.com / mafiahistory.us website, the biographies will be held in their own site on Blogger.com. The direct address for accessing the biographies is: http://mob-who.blogspot.com/ .

By placing the biography entries into the blogger site, they will be more easily searchable by name and keyword. With just 15 entries transferred into the new site to this point, the index has already reached 120 terms. As in the old biographies, links are provided from the biographies to American Mafia articles and crime family boss listings. Links to relevant issues of Informer and related Amazon.com books have been added.

All of the biographies are being edited/rewritten to bring them up to date with information acquired over the past nine years.

Joseph Barbara

One of the website changes that will probably draw some criticism is the removal of Joseph Barbara from the Scranton-Pittston, Pennsylvania, crime boss list.

 

Barbara is generally believed to have taken control of the crime family after the murder of boss John Sciandra in 1940 and to have served as boss until his own death in the summer of 1959. There are a number of problems with this accepted "history."

 

First, there is no evidence that Barbara ever gave orders to anyone in the Scranton-Pittston Mafia. That organization was controlled from the turn of the Twentieth Century by the "Men of Montedoro." (Barbara was from Castellammare del Golfo, not Montedoro.) Except for the insertion of Barbara into the succession of bosses, every other underworld leader of the region from 1903 through the middle of the 1990s had been born in Montedoro. There is little reason to believe that an exception was made in Barbara's case.

 

Second, there is no evidence that John Sciandra was killed in 1940 or at any other time. There are newspaper stories speaking of his death by natural causes in 1948 or 1949.

 

Third, Barbara seems to have had a very strong link to the Castellammarese population in Endicott, New York. The men closest to him were also from Castellammare. That Castellammarese outpost was mentioned in Joseph Bonanno's autobiography as the site of a meeting between Bonanno and Magaddino. While there are connections between Barbara and the Mafia of Scranton-Pittston, these seem to be secondary.

 

Finally, it seems very clear from the chain of events related to the 1957 meeting of Mafiosi at Barbara's country home in Apalachin, New York, that Barbara was at that time an underling of Stefano Magaddino. It was Magaddino – after urging from Tommy Lucchese (probably prompted by Vito Genovese) – who scheduled the meeting at Barbara's home. That is not something that could have been done unless Magaddino was Barbara's superior.

New address: mafiahistory.us

As work on the American Mafia history website redesign continues, there is a new web address for the site:

http://mafiahistory.us/

(Go ahead and try it now by clicking on the address above. I'll wait.)

The old address of onewal.com will continue to function, but this new alias/address should be far easier for new visitors to remember.

Cicale testimony added to site

We are indebted to Justin Dugard for purchasing, editing and contributing to The American Mafia website the October 14, 2008, federal court testimony of Stefan Cicale. Cicale was the government's key witness in the racketeering/murder trial of Bonanno Crime Family associate Joseph Young.

Cicale's direct examination testimony is broken up into three web pages for ease of use. A subject index will be added in the near future.

Joseph Young was convicted of the gruesome 2005 murder of Robert McElvey at the historic - and allegedly haunted - Kreischer Mansion on Staten Island (see photo). Cicale was charged as an accomplice and decided to cooperate with federal investigators.

The testimony can be accessed through the website's Articles menu or through this direct address:
http://www.onewal.com/a020/f_young.html

Update begins gradually

Visitors to The American Mafia website may begin to notice changes to certain pages. These are part of the overall site update. Various revised pages are now taking their places on the site. Some aspects of these pages - typestyles and formatting - may not look just right yet. The site's "stylesheet," which deals with these aspects, will be the final element to be brought online. This is necessary so that the older pages remain readable.