 Welcome to the original gangsters podcast another quick hitter edition some huge news that came out of the New York mob orbit this week and where it came out from is just as significant as the news itself. So you had newsbreak on Wednesday night of Joe Massino dying in witness protection. He actually died in New York City coming back to spend his final days with his family reconnecting and reconciling with some people. Everybody that's watching this I'm sure knows that Joe Massino was the most powerful mafia boss in America during the 1990s and early 2000s the boss of bosses in New York kingpin godfather of the Bonanno crime family and had had a role in the day-to-day affairs of that family going all the way back to the early 80s late 70s even you know late 79 with the assassination of Carmine Galante. He was mentored by Bill Rusty Rustelli was a front boss acting boss Rustelli died in June of 91 and Massino became the official don by the end of the the 90s heading into 2000s he had brought the bananas back from almost the dead they've been kicked out kicked out of the commission in the 80s for the Donny Brasco fiasco letting an undercover into the into the family and it disrupted a lot of things and lost a lot of respect but Massino polished that thing up and and got it back to where they were the the real standard bearer for the New York mafia at the last vestige of kind of the mobs glory era of the late mid to late 20th century and he was you know if you want to consider uh the the commission existing at that point and it was kind of like a makeshift commission uh he you know he was you know at the chairman of the board and then he he flipped and became the most the highest ranking organized crime member to ever cut a cooperation agreement with the government enter the witness protection program testify in open court it all kind of began to fall apart for him in the early 2000s when his brother-in-law and under boss salvatore good-looking sal vital vitali uh was alienated from him he was uh Massino was married to his sister and then you know lost him he jumped ship um had gotten jammed up and uh decided to to flip on on Massino became the star witness at Massino's trial Massino was convicted at at trial and racketeering murder accounts in 2004 and then quickly joined team USA wired up against his underlings including uh acting boss uh Vinnie Gorgias Bassiano and disappeared into witness protection program uh came out in the last couple days that uh been living in Ohio at the end I had been told that he was at first uh in Florida then relocated to Ohio eventually made it back to New York to reconcile with his family because he had been kind of exiled from them when he when he joined witness protection and left New York City I want to go back to how this news came out uh and the story was broken in surreal fashion by reputed Philadelphia mob boss skinny Joey Merlino who in the last couple weeks has uh thrown his hat into the ring in the podcast game on youtube a shout out to the skinny which is his youtube podcast and this is this is a huge feather in their cap gives them a ton of validation and credibility uh and frankly they're getting at least early on in the way this is being covered by the New York media the east coast media they're not getting their their their fair due um they're being ignored when they broke the story a news day came out with this um with this news that they were the first mainstream outlet to break it in uh late last night thursday night and they source uh Masino's daughter while they wouldn't have been reaching out to Masino's daughter for comment if Merlino and his podcast partner uh Joe Joe snuff little Joe snuff Joe Perry uh if they had him to put that out on wednesday so i i know it's unconventional and i understand that because of what some people think of Joey Merlino he claims that he's uh gone straight is out of the out of the mob game and his days as a mob shock caller are behind him that he living down in south florida away from his alleged mob kingdom and in um philadelphia and parts of new jersey uh you know he's been there for 12 years fed say that he runs it from afar he says he's got nothing to do with it now he's kind of trying to prove it by putting out this podcast which is more of a gambling podcast than a mob podcast but uh he wanted to speak on uh informants uh make his feelings felt on guys that had cooperated with the government and he dropped the nugget of information that Joe Masino had died uh and and a lot of people were skeptical uh it took 24 hours plus for other people to confirm it shout out to to jeff nadu and the sit down uh podcast he was the first media outlet that covers organized crime on a day-to-day basis to uh confirm the news and then newsday was the first mainstream outlet uh but newsday had no mention of the fact that this information first surface uh via joey merlino and the skinny podcast and that that's just as you know from a journalistic posture point of view and protocol it's wrong whatever you think of joey whatever you think of the medium uh or you know that he's a podcaster now you know this was a huge huge piece of news um that you know bombshell that that he rolled out that again i'm saying gives a lot of credibility to what he's trying to do you know uh that's a big piece of news he scooped everybody on it all due respect to jerry capesi all due respect to larry mccain and tony d stafano and all those great writers in new york city the the alleged mob boss the alleged godfather was like uh 10 10 miles in front of everybody that does this for a living including myself but you gotta include myself in there uh so i just think uh it's bad form and uh he should get acknowledged the show should be acknowledged um again it's surreal that uh you have someone who's looked at as maybe the most iconic modern day new millennium mob boss and joey merlino is breaking the news of the previous generations most iconic mob boss and joey merlino uh but that's what happened and that's where we are in 2023 uh and i've always called joey merlino and not always but the last 10 years of all i've coined the term for joey merlino is being the instagram don and you know it just means that he's he's he's tech savvy he's uh you know he's an influencer he was an influencer before he even knew the term influencer um and you know he he has the ability to adapt pretty quickly into uh into new you know territory and he'd only they'd only been in the podcast and game for like two weeks and breaks this huge piece of news so credit to them and i just wanted to point out that i wasn't thrilled that that uh news day didn't properly acknowledge where it came from and we'll see when the other news outlets in new york city start to roll out more coverage of this uh over the weekend new york post new york daily news new york times even uh and how how they cover it and source it so uh joe merlino is dead 80 years old lived the last 18 years in hiding under an assumed identity you know i don't need to tell you who joe merlino is people that are watching this know you know you know came up uh under rusty rostelli based out of mass pep queens was the quarterback of the infamous three capo slain's that you see in the movie donnie prosco uh and then rebuilt so the banano prime family into a juggernaut after uh it had fallen on hard times in in the in the 1980s in the aftermath of donnie prosco so uh joe massino dead at 80 joey merlino bright breaks the news here at the og pod we're always going to give credit where's credit's due so shout out to the skinny little joe snuff joey merlino for for breaking this big piece of news joe massino dead at eight years old i'm scott burnstein see you next time at og pod