Chris Mondics at the Philadelphia Inquirer offers a piece on former South Philadelphia Cosa Nostra hitman John Veasey (seen in the above photo by Jon Anderson/Philly.com), the subject of a 60 Minutes feature on TV tonight.
Convicted Philadelphia mob hit man John Veasey claims in a CBS News 60 Minutes report to be aired Sunday evening that he's a changed man, driving a church school bus and regularly attending worship services as a born-again Christian in a middle-class suburb.
Yet the program observes Veasey, who has married and works as a successful salesman of luxury cars in an undisclosed location in the Midwest, is still exhibiting some of his former underworld bravado.
He explains in the program how he instigated a barroom fight that resulted in his guilty plea for misdemeanor battery.
"I waited for him to take his drink, and I sized him up and I hit him with a good punch and the glass went through his face," the 60 Minutes website quotes Veasey as saying. "The only reason [the battery case] is big for me [is] because I'm a killer. You think about how many of your friends had a barroom fight growing up."
Veasey was a key player in the South Philly mob wars of the 1990s. Aligned with then-Philadelphia mob boss John Stanfa, Veasey participated in multiple murders and attempted murders, including the attempted killing of mobster Joseph "Skinny Joe" Merlino. In that August 1993 ambush, Michael Ciancaglini, another mobster, died on the sidewalk.
You can read the rest of the story via the below link:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20130317__60_Minutes__to_show_2_images_of_former_Phila__mob_hitman.html
You can also check out the video at CBS News via the below link:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57574273/ex-mob-killer-finds-god/
Note: I recall John Veasey well as I covered the mob war in my column for a local newspaper. I was on the scene only minutes after John Veasey's borther was murdered in South Philly.
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