Veteran organized crime reporter George Anastasia offers a piece in Inside Jersey on Nicholas "Nicky Skins" Stefanelli, a mob guy who wore a wire.
They said he was a “good man” and “solid as a rock.”
They said he had the right bloodlines, that his father had been one of them before him.
And that, they all agreed, was important.
This was how a group of mobsters, meeting over lunch at a restaurant in Kenilworth three years ago, described Nicholas “Nicky Skins” Stefanelli, a soldier in the Gambino crime family who was sitting with them that day.
“If you don’t know the families, the grandmothers, the grandfathers, forget it,” said Joseph “Scoops” Licata, a capo who ran a North Jersey crew for the Philadelphia mob.
“Only way to survive,” added John Gambino, a leader of the New York family that bears his name. “You only need quality, not quantity.”
They were at a table in a corner of the main dining room at LaGriglia, a small, classy restaurant just off the Garden State Parkway. This was in May of 2010. Ten mobsters from Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York broke bread for more than four hours that day. They talked about business and history, laughing and joking about who they knew and what they had done.
A federal prosecutor would later call it a meeting of the “board of directors” of organized crime, pointing out that the participants included leaders of both the Gambino crime family and the Philadelphia branch of Cosa Nostra. Defense attorneys would argue that it was just a group of friends having lunch and talking about the old days.
The one thing no one could dispute was that “Nicky Skins” was one of the guys at the table. The “good man” who the other mobsters praised, was, in fact, their worst nightmare.
He was a wiseguy wearing a wire.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
http://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/index.ssf/2014/01/nicky_skins_wiseguy_with_a_wire.html
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