The Sammy The Arab Murder: NYC Greek Godfather Ordered Hit On Lucchese Mob Associate……Or Did He?

June 10, 2022 — The Greek mafia don of Queens, New York, Spyredon (Spiro the Greek) Velentzas was convicted of ordering the gangland slaying of Lucchese crime family associate Sorecho (Sammy the Arab) Nalo, but others point the finger at bosses in the Lucchese clan. Nalo, a world-famous thief and racketeer from Detroit, was gunned down in his travel agency on October 25, 1988, while talking on the phone to Velentzas.

The 86-year old Velentzas has been in federal prison serving a life sentence since 1992 for Nalo’s murder. This past week, he filed a motion for a compassionate release because of an increasingly bothersome series of health maladies.

Hailing from Iraqi descent, Nalo came to New York from Detroit in the 1960s and hooked up with a Lucchese crime family crew led by Christopher (Christie Tick) Furnari, a future consigliere of the organization. Partnering with Rochester (NY) mob associate Bobby Comfort and with the help and protection from Furnari’s regime, Sammy the Arab’s burglary unit pulled off the biggest hotel robbery in history when they stole more than three million bucks from The Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in January 1972.

Nalo owned a popular Middle-Eastern themed nightclub called Port Said, which catered to a gangster crowd and became a known hot spot for Lucchese and Genovese crime family bigwigs. He began doing drug deals with other Iraqi mob figures in his hometown of Detroit in the late 1970s and by the mid-1980s, had established a Colombian cocaine connection through Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel, according to DEA records. His gambling affairs began pushing into the Astoria, Queens neighborhood overseen by Spiro Velentzas, a Boston transplant that ruled Astoria’s rackets.

Federal prosecutors convinced jurors that Spiro the Greek reacted to Sammy the Arab’s infringement onto his turf by placing a murder contract on his head. Velentzas has long claimed he was merely a pawn in a power play launched by Lucchese boss Vittorio (Little Vic) Amuso and then-Lucchese capo Peter (Fat Pete) Chiodo. Sources inside the Lucchese organization, both current and former, support Velentzas’ claim. Chiodo was Amuso’s liaison to Spiro the Greek’s crew and turned government informant.

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Roger Daltrey, Jessica Simpson & a Taser to the nuts: The wild history of OK! mag

Page Six reported at the end of April that OK! — the celebrity weekly launched by brash British publisher Richard Desmond — is set to stop publishing after a 17-year misadventure, making it perhaps the most expensive catastrophe in magazine history.

And to think it all began with a Taser to the nuts.

Desmond’s inauspicious foray into America began when he agreed to advertise phone-sex lines owned by New Yorker Richard Martino in the mainstream publications of his stable of British porn magazines, which also included such esteemed titles as Barely Legal and Readers Wives.

Regrettably, Martino turned out to be a high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family. And when the deal went sour, he allegedly had two men carjack one of Desmond’s executives on a New York business trip in 1992.

They jumped into the executive’s limo and “pistol-whipped him, slashed his face with a knife and applied a Taser-style stun gun to his testicles,” the Guardian reported, quoting court documents.

OK! Magazine launched their first US issue by signing up Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey for an unheard-of $1 million multi-cover deal.
OK! magazine launched its first US issue in 2005 by signing up Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey for an unheard-of $1 million multi-cover deal.

“If your boss sets foot here, he’s a dead man,” one of the goons reportedly said, as the shaken exec tearfully later recalled.

For his part, Desmond dismissed the whole episode, as described by the FBI, as “fantasy.” Testicular torture or no, the porn-rich publisher was intent on going legit and making it in the US.

“Dirty Des,” as the British press called him, sold his racy rags and stunned Britain by snapping up two of its oldest newspapers, the Daily and Sunday Express. He contributed generously to charities and became friends with celebrities, particularly David and Victoria Beckham and Roger Daltrey of the Who.

Publisher Richard Desmond, called "Dirty Des" by the British press, began his foray into American business when he agreed to advertise phone-sex lines in his stable of British porn magazines.
Publisher Richard Desmond, called “Dirty Des” by the British press, began his foray into American business when he agreed to advertise phone-sex lines in his stable of British porn magazines.
WireImage

A representative for Desmond didn’t respond to a request for comment on the specifics of his ownership of OK!

The original edition of OK! launched in the UK in 1997, copying the successful society-and-royalty magazine Hello! down to its almost-identical logo, but taking a more populist bent. Desmond courted Britain’s large corps of cheap and accessible household-name soap actors and reality TV stars, buying exclusive rights to cover their weddings, births and a Hallmark store’s worth of other occasions. 

All that money also gained him entry into the celebs’ cocktail parties and country estates.

But then Dirty Des set his sights on a bigger fish: America.

He started OK! in 2005 at the apex of the Golden Age of Celebrity Weeklies. Brangelina was ascendent. Jennifer Aniston was on the rebound. Paris and Lindsay were at large. It would be another year until most Americans would hear about Facebook for the first time.

After an ad-related business deal with Gambino crime family member Richard Martino (above) went south, Martino allegedly had two henchmen carjack and one of Desmond's executives and shock the man with a Taser to the testicles.
After an ad-related business deal with Gambino crime family member Richard Martino went south, Martino allegedly had two henchmen carjack one of Desmond’s executives and tase him in the testicles.
Bill Miller

Weeklies were the only magazines where single-copy sales at newsstands and grocery stores, not subscriptions, are what really count. The editor, using the cover as bait, has to seduce the reader anew every week. There are few masters of it.

Desmond had a perfect pick. Nicola McCarthy had worked at the UK edition of OK! but left to become the executive editor of Us Weekly. He lured her away — and landed in court before they even began the first issue, when Us sued over McCarthy’s contract. A judge in 2005 forced OK! to pay its rival’s hefty legal fees and banned Desmond from using McCarthy until her contract ran out — months after OK!’s planned launch.

She was replaced by another UK transplant, 29-year-old Sarah Ivens. Desmond and Ivens stood on that bold new horizon with a combined zero-year experience in the American market.

Still, they pulled off a coup: signing up Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey for an unheard-of $1 million multi-cover deal. But then publishing execs printed the first issue on the almost-newspaper-size paper that the UK version used — unaware, apparently, that US retailers display magazines in pockets several inches smaller than OK!’s pages. So the million-dollar cover was either folded in two and shoved in the pockets, or not displayed at all.

They forged ahead, hosting a bedazzled LA launch party attended by Simpson and Lachey with Sean Combs as the DJ. To the surprise of the staff, the next issue’s party pages were jammed with pictures of Desmond and pals, including Daltrey. To the new US editors, it seemed “crass.”

Brooke Shields and writer Oli Coleman during his time at OK! in 2009.
Brooke Shields and writer Oli Coleman during his time at OK! in 2009.
Patrick McMullan via Getty Image

The young staff — including this author, who worked there for over two years — embraced the party lifestyle, too, and could reliably be found getting bottle service with the cast of “Entourage,” partying at the same clubs as Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton or palling around with an almost-famous Kim Kardashian (then a “beauty editor-at-large” for the magazine).

Perhaps because it existed in a cocoon of Desmond’s bank account, there was a woozy sense of unreality around the Midtown offices. The true passion of an HR exec was a side gig as an author of erotica, writing under the pen name Mystique Allure. Desmond, quite illegally, smoked up a cloud of cigar smoke in the office.

His henchmen, schooled in Fleet Street newsrooms, screamed and swore at employees. A female executive referred to herself and Desmond in the third person as “Goldie and the Panther.” One staffer who relied on the job for a visa was capriciously fired, gave up his apartment, sold his furniture and bought a ticket home — only to be rehired. As he frantically scrambled to get his furniture back, he was re-fired weeks later.

OK! photoshopped a picture to make it appear as if Suri Cruise and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt were together.
OK! Photoshopped a picture to make it appear as if Suri Cruise and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt were together.
Bidding wars quickly escalated between celebrity weeklies, with People reportedly ponying up a $2 million-plus payday for Jennifer Lopez and photos of her twins.
Bidding wars quickly escalated between celebrity weeklies, with People reportedly ponying up a $2 million-plus payday for Jennifer Lopez and photos of her twins.

Meanwhile, Britney Spears’ birthday cake sat in the snack room freezer for years, like a celebrity-weekly version of a picture of Dorian Gray for the Botox Age.

Desmond had failed to spot a crucial difference between the UK and US markets. The former relies on the principle that if any given person is put in front of a camera for long enough, they will eventually become famous. With this Dunkirk-spirit approach to célébrité, Britain has turned all manner of hairdressers and disgraced politicians into bona fide bigshots. (Helpfully, the British also think soap stars are actually stars.)

The US, however, had a pantheon of untouchable Hollywood A-listers — and a smattering of TV actors and one-time Top 40 singers living in the sweet spot: accessible enough to buy up, famous enough to shift copies.

Magazines like In Touch, Star and Life & Style solved this problem with a guerrilla approach. Instead of paying for expensive exclusives, they got their cover fodder from paparazzi shots and intel from a network of deeply connected Hollywood sources.

In an effort to clean up his image, Desmond contributed generously to charities and became friends with celebrities that included David and Victoria Beckham.
In an effort to clean up his image, Desmond contributed generously to charities and became friends with celebrities, including David and Victoria Beckham.
AFP/Getty Images

But People and Us Weekly were a little more nervous. Until then, stars often gave exclusives to People for free because it got the most eyes on it. Us was used to writing relatively small checks.

Us complained when People kicked off the big-money bidding wars by paying $75,000 for a set of paparazzi shots of Jennifer Lopez. But suddenly it was People that found itself paying above the odds.

“Last year, we lost a couple of weddings because OK! magazine was willing to spend more money than we thought made sense,” said People’s then-editor Larry Hackett in the New York Times, adding that, if it continued, “they’re going to get traction, and I don’t want any competitor to get traction where I can stop it.”

Two years in, the Times of London wrote that, “After a troubled start, [OK! is] flying high.” The magazine was hitting 850,000 weekly sales. With People around 3.5 million, Us at 2 million, Star about 1.5 million, In Touch around 1 million and Life & Style at 600,000, that sounds impressive. The problem was that OK!’s cash firehose was only good enough to keep up with the competition — not to sink it.

The 2000s were a heyday for celebrity photos, as paparazzi chased celebrities like Paris Hilton, Katie Holmes and Angelina Jolie.
The 2000s were a heyday for celebrity photos, as paparazzi chased the likes of Paris Hilton, Katie Holmes and Angelina Jolie.

In fact, the only real winners in the weekly war were the celebrities. The watershed $1 million that OK! paid Jessica Simpson was soon dwarfed by the amount People reportedly paid — over $2 million — Jennifer Lopez for baby pictures in 2008. “We loved it,” said a celebrity publicist.

But Desmond had lost patience with losing a half-million dollars a week. The pressure on Ivens to deliver big sales without spending big bucks grew, and the sound of screaming British voices became a more familiar sound around the offices. Multiple editors told The Post they had trouble sleeping the night before the bi-weekly sales figures were published, fearful of what horrors a bad sale would bring down on their day.

Finally, Ivens had had enough. She quit in the fall of 2008 with no job to go to and moved to Kentucky. She was “34 and unhappy, anxious, living on my nerves,” she later wrote, claiming that she turned down $1 million from Desmond to stick around.

Ivens declined to comment for this story.

One morning in 2009, with sales nosediving, staff arrived to find the office plastered with dozens of sheets of paper, each with a large red “500” printed on it. The idea, it seems, was to will the staff into making a magazine that would sell 500,000 copies a week. This “Secret”-like manifesting did not work.

Desmond counted Roger Daltry of the Who as a good friend — so much so that OK! employees joked about Daltry choosing cover photos.
Desmond counted Roger Daltry of the Who as a good friend — so much so that OK! employees joked about Daltry choosing cover photos.
Getty Images

There followed a period of editorial identity crisis, with Desmond frantically cycling through editors, obviously casting about for someone who knew how to stem the bleeding. The plans swung wildly between upscale and downmarket. Often, they attempted to do both at the same time.

At one point, the exhausted staff out on the editorial room floor had booked a cover shoot with contestants from “The Biggest Loser.” Meanwhile, behind office doors, consultants were plotting to make OK!, as one of them queasily put it, “the frothy cappuccino at the end of a meal.” The two sides were so hopelessly disconnected that the next cover ended up featuring stars of the weight-loss game show wearing, for no obvious reason, ball gowns.

Meanwhile, Desmond’s interest seemed to drift. One staffer remembers a time when an editor-in-chief was left in a panic when Dirty Des couldn’t be located on his yacht to sign off on a cover. 

“I think Roger Daltery approved the 478th ‘Jennifer Aniston’s Baby Joy!’ cover,” joked one former staffer. “That poor woman. Her uterus should have had its own agent.”

Indeed, a virtually foolproof way of selling copies was to soothe whatever ulcerous wound in the American psyche is caused by the “Friends” actress’s lack of a child. By the end of the Desmond era, the magazine had bestowed a biblical 19 children on her. (She has no children.)

By the end of the Desmond era, OK! had bestowed a biblical — and fictional — 19 children on Jennifer Aniston.
By the end of the Desmond era, OK! had bestowed a biblical — and fictional — 19 children on Jennifer Aniston.

After the magazine lost a reported $25 million in 2010, Desmond put it on the market, courting then-People publisher Time Inc. as a buyer. When that deal went nowhere, he sold it to AMI (home of Star and the National Enquirer), which slashed costs, pooled resources with its other titles and scrapped exclusives.

In 2021, AMI sold OK!’s website to digital startup Empire Media and says it will continue to publish occasional special issues under the OK! brand.

Desmond stunned the UK once again in 2010 by buying money-losing British TV network Channel Five. He sold it four years later for a profit of around a half-billion British pounds. In 2020 he was reportedly worth around $2.5 billion — about a billion more than when he launched OK! in the US. He’s still friends with Roger Daltrey.

In 2020 he was reportedly worth around $2.5 billion — about a billion more than when he launched OK! in the US.
In 2020, Desmond was reportedly worth around $2.5 billion — about a billion more than when he launched OK! in the US.
Getty Images

Where things landed was sidelining exclusives in favor of, apparently, trying to divine what readers would like to see on the cover and then reverse-engineering a story to match. The cover stories began to read like fevered fan fiction. “Best Friends!” raved one cover, showing a picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s daughter Photoshopped next to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ kid. “Shiloh and Suri’s Play Date: The Little Girls Have an Afternoon Tea Party With Cupcakes, Giggles and Dresses Picked Out By Suri.” To the best knowledge of a number of then-editors, no such tea party took place.

Dirty Des declined to be interviewed, but a rep said: “He thoroughly enjoyed launching OK! in America and working with the great team that was there to help build it to the 7th largest newsstand magazine in America. Mr. Desmond was very proud of the exclusives that came to OK! because of its high reputation in the US and world market.”

Sarah Ivens, meanwhile, now has a Ph.D. and is the bestselling author of 11 books including “Get Real: Embrace Your Strengths, Accept Your Limits, and Create an Authentically Happier, Healthier You.”

This article was originally posted here

Sources: Police In Detroit Area May Be Hiding The Real Shooter In Hutch The Jeweler Murder, Man On Bike, Not Roy Larry Responsible

June 8, 2022 — There could be more than meets the eye in the police investigation surrounding last week’s broad-daylight murder of Motown’s “ice king,” Dan (Hutch the Jeweler) Hutchinson, the man responsible for outfitting some of the area’s biggest names in hip hop and sports with their high-end custom-made jewelry. Police have a man in custody, however, sources at the scene of the killing dispute that the man charged for the crime pulled the trigger.

Hutchinson was gunned down last Wednesday behind the wheel of his GMC Denali SUV in the parking lot of an Oak Park pawn shop he had just recently purchased. Hutchinson’s killing occurred at the corner of Greenfield and Miller, a short distance down the street from his Hutch’s Jewelers flagship store.

Roy Larry, 44, was arrested less than an hour later, after Hutchinson was pronounced dead at Providence Hospital in Southfield. Charged with first-degree murder and illegal firearm possession, Larry pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in Oak Park’s 45th District Court last Friday morning and was denied bond.

Oak Park Police say Larry opened fire on Hutchinson from outside his driver’s window, spraying more than a dozen shots into his head, body and neck. Witnesses at the scene says Larry wasn’t the shooter and that another man, a 20-to-25-year old light-skinned Black man on a bicycle actually did the killing. Larry has dark skin.

“The man on the news, the man the police have in custody for this murder, wasn’t the man who committed the murder……I should know, I was there,” said one witness. “I don’t know what they are hiding or why they are trying to hide it. That Roy Larry guy though isn’t the shooter. I never saw him. The shooter was on the bicycle and was at least 20 years younger and a whole lot lighter.”

One of these witnesses says, the man on the bicycle was subsequently ran over by a car in the pawn shop’s parking lot in the seconds after he shot Hutchinson, was rushed to Providence Hospital, where, according to the witness who was at the hospital, he was arrested at his bedside following surgery.

“They have the shooter in custody, they just aren’t telling anyone,” the witness said. “Roy Larry is either an accomplice, not the shooter, which goes against what the police are telling the public or he’s a patsy and there’s a whole lot more to see here behind the scenes. It’s frustrating for loved ones who just want authentic answers, not misdirection.”

The 47-year old Hutchinson’s wife, Marissa, was seated beside him when he was shot, but wasn’t wounded in the attack. Hutchinson’s slaying was a “contract hit.” per OPD detectives. A motive for the homicide has yet to be determined by authorities.

Multiple sources tell Deadline Detroit, the murder of Hutch the Jewler might be tied to rumors floating around the streets of Detroit during the winter that DEA and IRS agents were pressing Hutch to give information on narcotics traffickers laundering their money through jewelry stores around the area. Two additional sources speculate the murder may have something to do with Hutch’s purchase of the pawn shop he was killed at earlier in the spring.

Hutchinson’s family started the Hutch’s Jewlers chain in the 1990s out of the now-shuttered Northland Mall. Prominent local rappers like Big Sean, Tea Grizzley, Sada Baby, 42 Dugg, Icewear Vezzo and Payroll Giovanni were all loyal patrons of Hutch’s Jewlers.

“I used to take all my early rap money to Hutch,” Payroll Giovanni said. “Back then, it was 100 bucks. Then, when I had the scratch, I spent $100,000 on a diamond link. It was a goal of mine. I don’t wear it much, just for special occasions. I still can’t believe he’s gone. That they would do him like that in his own city. Damn, RIP Hutch.”

Payroll Giovanni is at the forefront of the underground rap scene in Detroit. He is signed to the iconic Dej Jam Recordings label out of New York.

Big-time drug kingpins and dope boys from the area have also made stops at Hutch’s stores and purchases of his jewelry staples in their schedules and wardrobes. Hutch’s specialties were diamond-encrusted “Olde English D” Detroit symbols and Cartier “buffs,” pairs of tortoise-shell glasses known as a symbol of status in the Motor City’s hip-hop and athlete crowd.

Hutchinson’s brazen slaying made headlines around the country, with rappers and athletes from coast-to-coast sharing their memories and condolences on their social media accounts. Miami rapper Rick Ross often shouted out Hutch the Jeweler on his Instagram, including a 2019 post where he showed off several new chains and rings he had bought from Hutchinson on a trip to Detroit.

Oak Park Police detectives and the DEA didn’t respond to calls for comment to this story.

This article was originally posted here