A Sicilian "Blood Vendetta" Amongst Mafioso

A Very Dubious Character...At Best!

George Colletti is a much more interesting gangland figure. Button Guys was able to track down his movements over the course of a half century or so.

His movements clearly tie him into the larger Castellammarese Mafia network known to have been active at the time in both Upstate Buffalo and the Downstate New York City area as well as his deep criminal connections in other cities where the mafia was also known to operate.

What follows are the eight known arrests for the criminal record of George Colletti.

He was a wild rogue, so I don’t doubt that he may have had other arrests that I was not able to find any record of.

July 1906 - Buffalo, NY

Colletti is arrested on ‘disorderly conduct’ charges stemming from the operation of a tavern he owned. He later pays a hefty $200 fine for the criminal activity he was connected with there, so the charge had to be related to something relatively significant.

September 1908 - Buffalo, NY

Colletti’s bail bond is forfeited by order of Judge Marcus who was hearing Colletti’s case on criminal charges of being the proprietor of a “disorderly house” and “promoting a disorderly house” (house of prostitution.)

He was also charged with white slavery. A young woman later testified in court accusing Colletti of holding her against her will for the purposes of forced prostitution while he was the saloonkeeper.

December 1908 - Buffalo, NY

Authorities charge Colletti a second time along with an associate of his named Philip Ray for running another “disorderly house.” He is held on bail but eventually gets out after posting up a bail bond.

He then promptly jumps that bond and was believed by the authorities to have fled New York State by crossing over the line into the State of Pennsylvania where he went into hiding.

February 1923 - Elizabeth, NJ

Colletti and associate James Fortorella are arrested for first-degree murder in the Caiozzo homicide. They will eventually be tried in New Jersey State Court for murder but are acquitted of all charges and subsequently released from custody.

November 1, 1930 - Columbus, Ohio

Colletti is arrested for ‘felony narcotics possession’ after he is caught with $25,000 worth of pure powdered morphine. He is charged with violating the Federal Harrison Narcotics Act.

March 21, 1931

He is subsequently convicted of the narcotics charges and is sentenced to serve nine years at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, GA. The judge also hits Colletti with a whopping fine of $2500.

1931 - Columbus, Ohio

While out on bail pending appeal of his drug conviction, Colletti once again jumps his $25,000 bail and flees the State of Ohio to avoid serving jail time after learning that his federal drug conviction has been affirmed by the Federal Appeals Court.

1932 - Philadelphia, PA

Having jumped bail in Columbus, Ohio, he is nabbed at a private residence in Philadelphia where he had been hiding out with his wife and son.

The then-forty-year old Colletti is arrested on a warrant for bailing jumping and thrown into a local lockup. A Federal Magistrate Judge then quickly places an additional $25,000 bond on him for safe measure.

1932 - Philadelphia, PA

Unbelievably, George Colletti makes arrangements with an agreeable, out of state bail-bond company and once again posts up this second $25,000 bail bond package (secured to the court by multiple property deeds supplied by the bondsman as collateral).

It becomes an exact rerun of previous events because Colletti then almost comically proceeds to jump this bail yet again and immediately disappears from the State of Pennsylvania.

1935

Colletti is nabbed by Federal Narcotics Agents for being a fugitive from justice. He had jumped bail twice before to avoid serving his nine-year federal prison term on his conviction for possession of morphine back in 1930.

Unbelievably, after five years “on the lam,” he is allowed to be placed under another whopping $25,000 bail package after he forfeited the previous two bonds imposed on him. He then immediately proceeds to jump this third $25,000 bond as well.

July 18, 1936

Now a narcotics fugitive thrice over, the 45-year-old Colletti is tracked down and arrested on fugitive warrants by drug agents in New York City after eluding capture for more than six years on his federal conviction.

Finally, the government wises up and he is denied bail altogether and thrown in federal prison to immediately start serving his long overdue nine-year jail sentence.

Deep Underworld Connections

It seems that George Colletti spent a number of years up in the Buffalo area during the early 1900s. We know that the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area hosted a huge Sicilian population many of whom were fellow immigrants from Castellammare del Golfo like Colletti.

During those early years in Buffalo, he operated as a known hoodlum and racketeer who ran houses of prostitution and a ‘speakeasy’ where he served illicit bootlegged liquor.

It’s almost a certainty that he had underworld connections at that time to the powers that be in Buffalo, namely, to Castellammare-born mafia bosses Angelo (Buffalo Bill) Palmeri and his successor Stefano Magaddino himself, who later relocated to upstate New York.

After Colletti is arrested for operating a prostitution racket, he jumps bail and flees Buffalo for the greener pastures of New Jersey where we know he continues to dabble in crime; because by 1923, he is arrested for the Caiozzo murder along with a criminal accomplice.

After beating the murder charge, he continues to operate in this laissez faire fashion.

He next turns up in Columbus, Ohio where he is arrested by Federal Narcotics Agents and United States Treasury Agents for possessing an estimated $25,000 worth of pure morphine after a raid on his hotel room before he can sell the drugs.

Colletti is nabbed at the hotel along with another accomplice named Pasquale Pastore of Philadelphia. Both men are charged.

Narcotics and Bail Bond Rackets

Within weeks, he is indicted by a federal grand jury and is later convicted before a jury for narcotics violations of the Federal Harrison Act.

The judge in the case then sentences Colletti to serve nine years at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia but allows Colletti to remain free on a whopping $25,000 bond while Colletti appeals this conviction.

Within the year, Colletti’s conviction is reaffirmed.

Upon learning that his appeal was denied and that he’s now going to jail, Colletti jumps bail once again and disappears from the jurisdiction.

Authorities cannot believe that he can repeatedly afford to lose his bail money. So, they start a deep investigate into the entire situation. They soon discover that the bail bond that was written for Colletti is a complete phony.

The U.S. Department of Investigation (a precursor to the FBI) is immediately brought into the important probe.

The authorities find what they later refer to as a widespread “straw bail racket” where bail bonds were repeatedly posted up for Colletti. Yet, all the bonds were fraudulent drawn.

After a preliminary investigation, the feds said the bail-bond racket appeared to have national implications and that the racket’s “brains” was a professional bondsman who operated through “straw men” to benefit the Italian underworld.

Federal agents said that after Colletti was convicted, he first posted up a $25,000 bond to stay free while appealing his conviction. But he promptly jumped bail and fled.

A nationwide search was then instituted for him, and in January of 1932, he was tracked down and arrested at a house on Watkins Street in the City of Philadelphia where he was residing with his wife Josephine and their son Charlie.

He was immediately thrown into a local jail at Central Police Court to await a hearing before a federal magistrate. The judge ended up holding Colletti in another $25,000 bail bond while he awaited an extradition hearing back to Ohio.

An additional third $25,000 bond was placed on him for good measure when he appeared the next day before U.S. Commissioner J. Howard Patterson.Colletti made that bail bond also and then promptly disappeared once more!

Frustrated federal authorities then attempted to collect on those forfeited bonds that Colletti had pledged up once and for all.

Under the direction of the court and U.S. Attorney Thomas J. Reilly, who was in charge of the case, efforts were made to sue out the bail bondmen. It was only then that investigators discovered that the deeds to 12 properties in the City of Philadelphia and another 9 properties located in Upper Darby that had been pledged were totally worthless.

The two persons who had been identified as offering the deeds, Federal investigators said, could not be identified as the true and rightful owners of the properties. In other words, they were all fraudulent deeds or counterfeit documents.

Colletti was finally tracked down nearly three years later and arrested at a bar and grill run by members of his extended family in the Astoria-Long Island City section of Queens, New York.

POSTSCRIPT

Continuing Mafia Ties That Bind

There was at least one other very notorious mafioso who never immigrated to America with the Caiozzo surname.

It has been well documented that a Guiseppe (Don Peppe) Caiozzo of Castellammare del Golfo was a known mafioso, gunman, and extortionist based in the Trapani Province during the 1950s-1970s era.

In fact, one of the first and most important cases ever investigated and prosecuted by famed Italian Prosecutor Giovanni Falcone was in 1967 when Carabiniere arrested an incensed Caiozzo on the very day of his marriage to his young bride for an old 1958 double-murder they charged he carried out on behalf of his local mafia cosca.

Falcone charged Caiozzo and two of his associates with the crime.

One accomplice was Vincenzo Virga who was little known at the time but would later also become infamous as a top mafioso in Trapani Province.

The three assassins were said to have repeatedly shot a wealthy land owner named Stefano Barone and his wife and the couple’s son in a farmhouse after Barone had fallen out of favor with the local cosca when he resisted repeated extortion letters they had sent to him.

Although his wife and son were killed in the attack, Stefano Barone survived his wounds and later testified in open court that the mafia had killed his family members and had attempted to murder him in order to wrest control of his vast land and property holdings from him.

Another mafioso named Antonino Buccellato was also denounced as being the third man involved in the shootings but he was never able to be brought to justice by Judge Falcone.

Barone’s court testimony identified Caiozzo as the gang’s leader and the main assassin and protagonist in the criminal plot against him.

Falcone also accused Don Peppe Caiozzo of having stolen 170 sheep off the farm of a man named Antonino Angelo in 1964 as well as many other crimes such as coercion and extortion against other local shopkeepers by using his reputation as an important mafioso to intimidate them in paying him money or providing free services to him such as receiving free meat from the local butcher, free gasoline from a service station, etc.

A Very Dangerous Mafioso

The famous Judge Falcone later wrote a book of his memoirs about his time as a young prosecutor challenging the Sicilian mafia. In it he describes Guiseppe Caiozzo as an important assassin and mafioso over the Castellammare countryside.

Known as “Don Peppino,” the “Don” title given to Caiozzo connoted a stature and certain reverence within the larger mafia criminal fraternity.

The prosecutor noted that Caiozzo was an intimate of other well known mafiosi of the Castellammare cosca such as Buccellato, who had the nickname “Scarpareddu,” Giovanni Abbate, Ignazio Drago, Vincenzo Virga, and Giuseppe Magaddino.

In 1969, Caiozzo and another local mafioso, who coincidentally was also named Barone (a cousin of Stefano Barone) who was suspected of colluding in the plot against his relative Stefano were finally convicted of murder and sentenced to serve 30 years and 20 years in prison, respectively.

"Friends of the Friends"

It is interesting to note that although the families of Magaddino, Buccellato, and Caiozzo were at odds killing one another decades earlier both in Sicily and later in America, by the 1940s, there seems to have been a “mending of fences,” so to speak.

Because after that time period, we see mafiosi with those very same surnames now working together in tandem in various mafia activities. The above case is a perfect representation of that.

We see the same trend in the United States where, by the 1950s through the 1980s, two mafiosi named Giuseppe (Peppino) Buccellato and Francesco (Frank) Buccellato were both documented as being important members of the Joseph Bonanno Family of New York.

In fact, both Buccellato’s were said by the FBI to have been elevated to “capos” in Bonanno’s borgata. So, whatever conflicts they may have had decades earlier, the descendants of these very same mafiosi on both continents were now operating as one entity.

Such is the Byzantine existence for “men of honor” in the Sicilian underworld…or as they say, “The Life!”

Until next time…”The Other Guy”

A Sicilian “Blood Vendetta” Amongst Mafioso – Chapter 3

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