40 Interesting Facts about Mobs and Gangs – Part 2

A Chicago mobster named Sam DeStefano loaned money at interest rates of 25% by week to very high-risk debtors such as drug addicts, in order to torture them in his cellar when they defaulted.

27. The Italian mafia is involved in nuclear waste trafficking. They have bought nuclear power plant waste and dumped it in Somalia.

28. There was an Orthodox Jewish gang named New York divorce coercion who kidnapped Orthodox Jewish men and forced them (sometimes with torture) to grant their wives religious divorces. They operated between 1980s and 2013.

29. Gregory Scarpa Sr., the hitman who helped the FBI solve the 1964 Freedom Summer murders hated black people so much that he refused to take blood from a blood bank, fearing that some of the blood may have come from a black person. He received blood from a fellow mobster, only to contract HIV as a result.

30. In 2013, Italian mafia organization ‘Ndrangheta’ made more money than McDonald’s and Deutsche Bank combined (€53 billion / £44 billion).

Ron Launius, the ring leader of Hollywood's Wonderland Gang, was a United States Air Force veteran of the Vietnam era, who had been dishonorably discharged and convicted of smuggling heroin from Vietnam back to the United States in the corpses of American soldiers.

32. A Prohibition-era gangster named Dutch Schultz once hung a rival by his thumbs on a meat hook and then wrapped discharge from a gonorrhea infection over his eyes.

33. Mobster Bugsy Siegel traveled to Italy in 1938 and offered to kill Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Benito Mussolini, but was stopped by his anxious mistress.

34. Frank Sheeran, the mob hitman whose life is depicted in Martin Scorsese’s film “The Irishman,” participated in the Dachau Massacre, during which scores of SS concentration camp guards were executed en masse by U.S. GIs after the camp was liberated in April 1945.

35. Du Yuesheng, a Triad boss was granted the rank of general in the Nationalist Chinese army after he ordered his gang to massacre 1000s of communist supporters. He then became head of the Opium Suppression Bureau, which he used to seize opium to be sold by his own criminal organization.

In 2010, a Danish Biker gang named Black Cobra stole 120 boxes of cakes. They took almond tarts, punch rolls, apple crowns, and brownies.

37. John Franzese was a mob boss who was taped by an informant discussing the ideal method of disposing of a body. He recommended taking 30 minutes to an hour to dismember the body in a kiddie pool, dry the parts in a microwave and finally mulch them in a commercial-grade garbage disposal.

38. Chicago gangs in the 1970s and 80s made business cards, or "compliment cards," with member nicknames, associated symbols and turf, and the names and symbols of rival gangs. These cards were used to show affiliation, recruit new members, and disrespect rival gangs by inverting their symbols.

39. In the Warlord Era (1916-1928), when a Chinese assassin named Shi Jianqiao was 19-years-old, her warlord father was defeated and executed by a rival, Sun Chuanfang. Shi spent her 20s tracking Sundown, killing him in 1935. Chinese society was so moved by her act of filial revenge that the court pardoned her.

40. The notorious mob hitman Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan was credited with the murders of 20-30 people including Irish mobster Micky Spillane and was the only person to ever escape Attica prison