Aniello Migliore

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Aniello "Neil" Migliore (b. October 2, 1933) is an East Harlem born mafioso and acting leader of the Lucchese crime family. Migliore was a close associate of family bosses Thomas Lucchese and Anthony Corallo, remaining a protege of Corallo.[1], and had been scheduled to attend the 1957 La Cosa Nostra summit in upstate New York, before the meeting was raided by law enforcement, also Migliore was one of the fastest rising stars in the family, reaching capo by 40.

Sometime in the 1970s Migliore became a captain in the family and was already a powerful labor racketeer in the New York City construction and trucking industries. Migliore owned a large Queens based concrete company and had been a second-in-command to Joseph Lucchese, who was a captain in the family. The two men operated a largescale lucrative illegal gambling and numbers operation.

On March 21, 1986, Migliore was indicted with Genovese crime family front boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and a host of soldiers and labor official associates in a massive bid rigging and extortion case. The men were charged with helping to elect Roy L. Williams in 1981 as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Buildings where bid-rigging was said to have occurred, besides Trump Plaza, at 167 East 61st Street, included several other luxury apartment buildings and residences for Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, all in Manhattan. On May 4, 1988, Migliore, Salerno and captains Vincent DiNapoli and Matthew Ianniello were convicted of the labor racketeering charges.

In August 1991, Migliore's conviction was overturned and he was released from prison. Migliore came back to a family battered by the abusive regime of Vittorio Amuso and Anthony Casso, the first time the family's leadership was not centered with the East Harlem/Bronx faction. Amuso and Casso had ordered many killings during their short reign on the street, and many of those Lucchese wiseguys were killed merely because Amuso and Casso thought they may "rat" or found them to be a threat.

On April 3, 1992, Migliore was shot and wounded in a Westbury, Long Island, restaurant while celebrating the birthday of a friend's granddaughter [2]. The shotgun blasts came from a passing car from which one or two blasts of a shotgun were fired into the window, hitting the victim in the head and chest. Migliore's death had apparently been ordered by Amuso from his prison cell, who had feared that Migliore may remove Amuso as official boss and therefore cut off Amuso's cash stream. Some investigators suspected that Lucchese soldier Paolo LoDuca, an Italian cocaine trafficker, was responsible for setting up the attempted hit. The attempt on his life did not sway Migliore away from the crime family though.

Since about 2000, Migliore with Matthew Madonna and Joseph DiNapoli, all members of the East Harlem/Bronx faction, were part of the Lucchese family's ruling panel in the absence of family acting boss Steven Crea, a Bronx wiseguy. Migliore remains a respected and highly regarded wiseguy. It is unclear whether Vic Amuso still maintains control of the family anymore, but it is known that in after former acting boss Joseph DeFede was released from prison Amuso planned on killing him for hiding family profits.

[edit] Further reading

Goldstock, Ronald, Martin Marcus and II Thacher. Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction Industry: Final Report of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. New York: NYU Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8147-3034-5
Kelly, Robert J. The Upperworld and the Underworld: Case Studies of Racketeering and Business Infiltrations in the United States. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0-306-45969-8
United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Governmental Affairs. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Organized Criminal Activities: south Florida and U.S. Penitentiary, Atlanta, Ga.: hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs. 1980. [3]