Las Vegas; Mafia’s crimes are submerged in Lake Mead

Two sisters from Henderson, Nevada, were paddle boarding on the lake near a former marina resort, when they shockingly found bones on a newly uncovered sand bar. During the weekend that followed, boaters discovered a man’s decaying body in a rusted-out barrel covered in muck.

The body has not been recognized, but based on the shoes discovered at the scene, he was shot somewhere between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. The death has been treated as a homicide investigation. On April 25, the falling lake level revealed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake, prompting the local water authority to convert to a deep-lake intake. Over 2.4 million inhabitants as well as 40 million tourists now rely on this intake system every year.

Lindsey Melvin, who photographed the site, said they initially mistook it for the skeleton of a local bighorn sheep. With a closer look, a human jaw with protruding teeth was visible. They contacted park authorities, and the National Park Service confirmed that the bones were originating from a human in a statement.

Las Vegas police stated that there was no immediate indication of foul play so they’re not investigating. If the Clark County coroner believes the death was unusual, a homicide investigation will be launched, according to the agency.

Geoff Schumacher, vice president of The Mob Museum, a refurbished historic downtown Las Vegas post office and federal facility that debuted in 2012 as The National Museum, anticipated that more bodies would be unearthed.

After a second set of human remains discovered in a week from the depths of a drought-stricken Colorado River reservoir within a 30-minute drive from the reputedly mob-founded Strip, Las Vegas is flooded with legend about organized crime.

Former Las Vegas Mayor, and lawyer for Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, Oscar Goodman, stated on Monday, “There’s no knowing what we’ll find in Lake Mead… It’s not a bad spot for a body to be dumped.”

He wouldn’t say who might be found in the massive reservoir created by the Hoover Dam, which spans Nevada and Arizona.

“I’m relatively sure it was not Jimmy Hoffa,” he joked. However, he said that many of his former clients appeared to be interested in “climate control,” AKA keeping the lake level up above any bodies that may lurk below.

After offering a $5,000 reward for qualified divers to search for more barrels, David Kohlmeier, a former police officer and current co-host of “The Problem Solver Show” podcast, said he received calls from people in San Diego and Florida willing to make an attempt.

Officials with the National Park Service stated that Kohlmeier is not authorized to organize that operation, and that there are hundreds of barrels in the depths dating back to the 1930s when Hoover Dam was built.

Kohlmeier said he also received information from the families of missing people, including a man accused of murdering two family members in 1987, a parent from Utah who vanished in the 1980s, and a 1992 disappearance of a hotel employee.

“You’ll probably find remains all throughout Lake Mead,” Kohlmeier added, referring to Native Americans who were among the region’s first settlers.

“I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,” said Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, alluding to the iconic criminal who established the Flamingo on the Strip in 1944. In 1947, Siegel was assassinated in Beverly Hills, California by an assailant still unknown to this day.

People are talking about the discovery not only about mob strikes, but also about delivering relief and closure to mourning families, according to Green.

Source: New York Post

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June 13, 2022 — The thread that could unravel the historic Operation Family Secrets investigation in Chicago might lie with the first murder charged in the case. Sources claim issues with the sweeping 2005 indictment and successful prosecutions two years later begin with the summer 1970 gangland slaying of Outfit loan shark Michael (Hambone) Albergo.

Turncoat Chicago mafia lieutenant Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese, the Family Secrets trial’s star witness, admitted to participating in the Albergo murder conspiracy, but failed to lead authorities to Albergo’s remains. The FBI searched for Albergo in 2003 in a dig conducted near Guaranteed Rate Field on the city’s Southside and came up empty. Today, Calabrese, 79, resides in the Witness Protection Program, the only “made” man in the Chicago mob to ever rat.

Some sources are skeptical of Calabrese’s role in the Hambone Albergo hit. He testified to watching his older brother, Southside Outfit enforcer Frank (Frankie Breeze) Calabrese strangle Albergo and then slit his throat. In the rest of the murders Nicky Calabrese copped to being involved in, he participated in the actual killing itself. One source says he can lead investigators to Albergo’s remains and engaged with authorities regarding a dig.

“Mikey Bones,” as he was called by friends, was a loan shark and collector for Chicago mob shot callers in the Cicero and Southside-Chinatown crews, respectively. The bald 43-year old behemoth had just been indicted in a federal juice-loan case when he went missing on August 11, 1970.

The Family Secrets Case was the biggest mob prosecution by the feds in the history of Chicago, charging 14 Outfit members, including an acting boss, a consigliere and two crew bosses, with a whopping 18 previously-unsolved gangland murders. The murders spanned from 1970 to 1986. Albergo’s murder was the coldest case of the bunch.

Strife in the Calabrese family led to the epic case being built from behind bars in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Frankie Breeze’s son wiring up on his dad, who implicated his uncle, Nicky Slim, in a series of cold-case homicides. Frankie Breeze and his kid were locked up on racketeering charges in a federal correctional facility in Michigan, while Nicky Slim was imprisoned on the same conviction in Illinois. Frankie Breeze died in prison of cancer on Christmas Day 2012.

Questions regarding the integrity of the 2005 case and slate of forthcoming convictions, surfaced in subsequent years when longtime Chicago mafia don John (Johnny No Nose) DiFronzo wasn’t indicted in the heavily-rumored yet never filed, Operation Family Secrets II. DiFronzo was implicated in taking part in mob hits during the 1970s and 1980s by Nick Calabrese in his debriefing and testimony. DiFronzo died of natural causes in the spring of 2018 at age 89.

Three years ago, the case’s most notorious co-defendant, Chicago mob consigliere, Joey (The Clown) Lombardo, petitioned the court to reconsider allowing an affidavit signed by an associate of Lombardo’s alleging a conflicting scenario to what was established as fact in prosecution of the 1974 homicide of government witness Danny Siefert as part of Family Secrets to be entered into the court record.

Lombardo died of throat cancer in October 2019, three months after penning a hand-written motion to the court claiming he was unaware of the assertion of Outfit associate and convicted felon Charles (Chuckie Wallace) Micelli that as a young boy he witnessed a dirty Chicago Police Department officer named Rick Madeja kill Seifert. Madeja was kicked off the police force in 1981 for selling guns and silencers on the black market and currently lives in Wisconsin.

Madeja’s 1981 case was prosecuted by former highly-decorated U.S. Attorney Mitch Mars, the star prosecutor in Family Secrets more than a quarter century later. Mars succumbed to a battle with lung cancer in 2008, months removed from earning the most prestigious courtroom victory of his career in flashbulb-infused Family Secrets.

Despite Judge James Zagel banning Micelli’s testimony before trial in 2007 on credibility concerns, several prosecutors and police officers have vouched for Micelli’s merit as a witness in other cases in writing. As lethal as he was colorful, Lombardo reportedly tried to put out a murder contract on Zagel’s heads from his North Carolina prison hospital room and lived out his final years in a 23-hour lockdown at the feds’ SuperMax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Danny Siefert was gunned down in front of his wife and young son after deciding to testify against Lombardo in a federal fraud and racketeering case revolving around the Teamsters’ union pension fund and a New Mexico work pail manufacturing company. Lombardo’s fingerprint was found on a car-rental registration card for a vehicle used in the Seifert hit and remarked to an associate, “that Siefert motherfucker won’t be testifying against anyone now,” at a golf driving range on the morning following Seifert’s murder.

The charges against the famously-wisecracking Lombardo were dropped when Siefert was no longer available to take the stand. Lombardo served as one of Micelli’s father figures growing up in the 1970s during Joey the Clown’s first decade running the Chicago Outfit’s Westside-Grand Avenue crew’s rackets. In 1992, Lombardo got promoted to his consigliere post.

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A one-time notorious Colombo family mob boss who is now gravely ill with dementia was denied release from prison by a federal appeals court Wednesday — all but assuring he’ll die behind bars. 

Victor “Little Vic” Orena’s appeal for compassionate release was slapped down by a three-judge panel from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with a lower-court jurist in affirming his life sentence. 

Orena, once the acting boss of the Colombos, was sentenced to life in prison in the early 1990s after his conviction in Brooklyn federal court on murder, racketeering and other Mafia-related crimes. 

The former shot-caller, now 87, asked a Brooklyn federal judge to free him in 2021 because of his deteriorating health — and because his lawyer discovered new evidence that allegedly casts doubt on his conviction. 

On Wednesday, the appeals court panel wrote that while even federal prosecutors agree his health issues are “extraordinary and compelling,” the district court judge correctly ruled they do not outweigh the need for a life sentence.

The judges also ruled that if there is indeed new evidence that proves Orena’s innocence, it should be raised in a separate appeal — not one for compassionate release. 

The wiseguy’s crimes that put him away for life related to a murderous, intra-family Colombo war that pitted factions loyal to Orena against those who backed the late Carmine “Junior” Persico. More than a dozen people were killed in the beef. 

“The five Families’ criminal activities and the war between the competing Colombo factions resulted in multiple assassinations and attempted assassinations and billions of dollars of economic impact on the city,” the appeals court panel wrote in the decision Wednesday. 

Orena is serving time in FMC Devens, a federal medical center with an attached minimum-security prison. 

His attorney did not immediately respond to request for comment.

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