The Police Operation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was able to collect the needed information through informant Joseph Vollaro, (owner of truck company on Staten Island) who secretly recorded several conversations with members of the Gambino family. More than 80 people were indicted in the Eastern District of New York. The case is now referred to as United States of America v. Agate et al. It was initially assigned to Judge Nicholas Garaufis, but later reassigned to Judge Jack B. Weinstein.
Gambino crime family boss Nicholas Corozzo turned fugitive after he was tipped off by his daughter who witnessed her husband and fellow mobster being led away by the US authorities. On May 29, 2008, Corozzo finally couldn't take life on the run anymore and so he turned himself in to authorities with his lawyer by his side. As of May 30, 2008, Corozzo is incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York. Of the 62 American defendants, 60 pleaded guilty with at least 52 of them facing no more than three years in prison.
The operation broke up a growing alliance between the Gambinos and the Sicilian Mafia, who wanted to get further into the drug trade. One of those arrested in the raids in the US was Frank Cali, a captain in the Gambino family. He is allegedly the "ambassador" in the US for the Inzerillo crime family.
The name of the police operation, "Old Bridge", refers to the historical ties of an exile group of Sicilian Mafiosi across the Atlantic ocean. After the Second Mafia War in the beginning of the 1980s the surviving members of the Inzerillo Mafia Family had been "allowed" to migrate to New York to avoid extermination by the Corleonesi faction and then victorious Sicilian boss of bosses Salvatore "Toto" Riina. The Inzerillo’s American relatives and associates of New York's Gambino family intervened on their behalf. They were allowed to settle in the States in exchange for a pledge: neither they nor their offspring would ever again set foot on Sicilian soil. They became known as gli Scappati, the Runaways. Two decades later, the Runaways were returning to Palermo. The exiles had good reasons: Riina and his successor Bernardo Provenzano, were both arrested and are serving life terms in Italy. The runaway Inzerillo clan was allegedly rebuilding the "Old Bridge" between America and Sicily, reestablishing the business and drug trafficking ties between the Sicilian and American mobs.
Read more about this topic: Operation Old Bridge
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