BREAKING NEWS: Feds In Florida Bust Old-School Colombo Mobster “Tom Mix” Farese In Fraud Case, Yes, Another One!
July 13, 2025 –Longtime Colombo mob South Florida rackets boss Thomas (Tom Mix) Farese was indicted yet again this week for Medicare fraud out of U.S. District Court in Tampa but arraigned in Ft. Lauderdale. The Miami Herald broke the news of Farese’s latest run-in with the law.
And no, it’s not deja vu, this is his second such case in recent years. He pleaded guilty in the spring to a similar case out of New Jersey in a reported $95,000,000 healthcare rip-off caper just last month.
The 83-year old former Colombo clan consigliere “Tom Mix” Farese nicknamed after the famous early Westerns film-genre actor is a two-time convicted federal felon who held the No. 3 role in the Colombos for most of the 2010s and is known for his past days as a politically-connected drug-trafficking cowboy gangster with hand-over-fist cash flowing from his dope and strip-club empire in the disco-grooving 1970s South Florida mob scene. He used a trucking company (Olympic Shipping Lines) to transport his drugs and a trio of strip clubs in Hialeah (Pink Pussycat), Sunrise (The Goldfinger) and West Palm Beach (Club Diamonds) to wash his illicit gains and those of other area marijuana and cocaine kingpins until the feds brought him down in 1980.
Farese used medical-equipment business in Broward County to bilk senior citizens’ Medicare programs funded by the government for millions of dollars in illegal proceeds, submitted false billing receipts and paid kickbacks to telemedicine companies to be fed unknowing patients and doctors to ensnare in the scheme, according to prosecutors at his court hearing on Wednesday. Colombo mob affiliate Patsy Truglia is Farese’s co-defendant in both the New Jersey case and the Florida one just filed. Truglia, 57, has acted as Farese’s driver and bodyguard for a number of years and copped a plea in the Jersey case, receiving a 15-year prison term. and being fined $20,000,000. Per FBI intelligence briefing documents, Farese was mentored in the mob’s South Florida rackets by Colombo mob skipper Nicky (Jiggs) Forlano.
Farese’s road to the Colombo mob administration was paved by his marriage into the Persico mob dynasty, via his wedding the daughter of former Colombo crime family titan Alphonse (Allie Boy) Persico, thus becoming Colombo mob boss Carmine (The Snake) Persico’s nephew. Carmine Persico headed the Colombos for more than four decades — most of it spent behind bars — before finally cashing in his chips on March 9, 2019 in a federal prison hospital. FBI and court records cite his induction into the Colombo LCN organization came in a July 1978 making ceremony. His nephew by marriage, Theodore (Skinny Teddy) Persico is the current boss of the Colombo mob. Doing 15 years in the feds from the charges stemming from his wild early Florida days in the sun, Farese popped his head out briefly in the 1990s before getting pinched again in 1996 and going back to the can for another eight years. Earning his release from the feds in 2005, he’ll be soon returning as an octogenarian (his sentencing hearing is scheduled for July). Although he was arrested in a 2011 money-laundering case out of Brooklyn, Farese won acquittal at trial on the charges.
