Bosco Radonjich

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Bosco or Bosko “The Yugo” Radonjich was a Serbian-born nationalist, operative for the Central Intelligence Agency and later leader of the Westies, a predominantly Irish-American gang based in New York's Hell's Kitchen.

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[edit] Early life

Before his immigration to the U.S., Bosco worked in conjunction with the CIA for many years against Communism in his homeland.

His recorded odyssey in the U.S. began in 1970, when he moved into the West Side of Manhattan where he worked as a parking lot attendant and became an explosives expert for the Serbian underground.

In 1975, Radonjich took part in a bombing at the Yugoslav mission to the U.N. in which no one was hurt. In 1978, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in the 1975 bombing of a Yugoslavian consul's home in Chicago and for plotting to bomb a Yugoslav social club in the Windy City.

Upon his release in 1982, Rondonjich moved back to New York’s West Side and began working as a minor associate of Jimmy Coonan. Radonjich was able to seize control of the gang following the imprisonment of many of the Westies leadership during the late 1980s. Under his leadership, he was able to reestablish the Westies' former working relationship with the Gambino crime family under John Gotti, and was involved in the jury tampering during Gotti's original 1986 trial for racketeering.

He and associate Brian Bentley operated a successful burglary ring using two Hispanic gang members until the the arrest of Bentley and his group in the early 1990s. Later investigations under Michael G. Cherkasky, chief of the Investigations Division of the District Attorney's Office, would eventually force Radonjich to flee the country in 1992 to avoid prosecution.

While on the run, Radonjich became a close advisor to Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader charged with genocide, whom Radonjich described in a 1997 Esquire article as: "My angel, my saint."

After several years of hiding in the former Yugoslavia, he was arrested by U.S. custom officials while on a stopover in Miami, Florida on January 28, 1999. Held without bail, he was tried under a 1992 indictment for jury tampering in Gotti's racketeering trial.

In 2001, Westie-turncoats Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy McElroy and Billy Beattie, testified against Bosko Rondonjich in court, who then received a 12-year prison sentence which began in 2002.

[edit] Quotes

  • "If you're a freedom fighter, you have to love the Irish."

[edit] In popular culture

He was later portrayed by Stephen Payne in the 1998 television movie Witness to the Mob.

[edit] Further reading

  • Davis, John H. Mafia Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the Gambino Crime Family. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ISBN 0-06-016357-7
  • English, T.J. The Westies: Inside the Hell's Kitchen Irish Mob. St Martin's Paperbacks, 1991. ISBN 0-312-92429-1

[edit] External links

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