Former Detroit drug world figure Stephen (Freaky Steve) Roussell was slain 30 years ago this week in the fall of 1987, a victim of romance-gone-wrong amid the city’s bullets-and-brawn charged crack wars. The 20-year old Roussell had been high-profile teenage drug dealer Richard (White Boy Rick) Wershe’s right-hand man and closest friend. Wershe, 48 and the nation’s
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Former Rochester, New York Teamsters union member and east coast labor and mob historian Blair T. Kenny recently put out his second book, The Rochester Mob Wars (purchase a copy here) , chronicling the now-defunct crime family’s turbulent turf battles of the 1970s and early 1980s. The conflict became known in the media as the Alphabet Wars for its confusing alliances
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After making a crude drunken pass at the girlfriend of Somerville Gang member Alex (Bobo) Petricone at a Salisbury Beach bar on Labor Day, September 4, 1961, Charleston Gang member Georgie McLaughlin was beaten unconscious starting over a decade of volatile unrest in Boston’s Irish underworld. There was a brief reprieve from the violence in
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Entertainment industry legends Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin avoided being witnesses and possibly unintended collateral damage in the infamous mob murder of Genovese crime family underboss Willie Moretti in the fall of 1951. Moretti was assassinated as he ate lunch at his favorite restaurant, Joe’s Elbow Room in Cliffside Park, New Jersey on October 4, 1951, a meal
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