Bosko Radonjich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bosko Radonjich
Alias(es) The Yugo
Penalty 12-year prison
Status captive
Occupation gangster

Bosco or Bosko “The Yugo” Radonjich is a Serbian-born nationalist, a former 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.

Contents

[edit] Early life

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

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, Radonjich 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 supervised Westie underling Brian Bentley's highly successful burglary ring using two Hispanic gang members until 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 Karadžić, the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader charged with war crimes, whom Radonjich described in a 1997 Esquire article penned by Daniel Voll 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 Radonjich in court, who then received a 12-year prison sentence which began in 2002.

[edit] In popular culture

[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