It was June 20, 1992, when the New York Times ran an article ending the days and days of "godfather" Velenza: "Mafia-linked man guilty of 10 crimes" was the headline.
The reason for the then 57-year-old boss of the Greek underworld of Queens and Brooklyn, who had just been convicted of gambling, extortion, usury and tax evasion, among others, by the Brooklyn Federal Court.
The court did not even manage to reach a verdict for the most serious crime he was charged with, the murder of a jewelry thief.
Prosecutors Kevin McGrath and Elizabeth Lesser told the newspaper that Velentzas was in charge of a major gambling and money laundering network in New York and mainly in the Greek community of Astoria. But also that his criminal union had close contacts with the Italian mafia and especially the Lucchese family.
With him in the much-praised 12-week trial were sentenced both of his leaders, Peter Drakoulis and Michael Grillo, but his brother Dimitrios escaped. After all, he was accused of only one charge, for illegal gambling.
Spyredon "Spiros" Velentzas, as he is known on the other side of the Atlantic, proved to be indeed the Greek "godfather" of New York. He said it himself later. But he was also a personal friend and partner of the other "godfather", the "godfather of godfathers" John Gotti, the infamous boss of the Gambino family who came to control all of New York and beyond.
Stuck on pedestals, when they grew up on the streets of Queens and everyone knew them as Greek and Italian, they both climbed the ladder of their own unions.
And finally Velentzas was the man Gotti was referring to when he infamously proclaimed: "Tell this bum that I, John Gotti, will uproot his fucking head!" Although Velentzas held his head, he was destined to have the same fate as the "leader of the leaders".
Behind the railings today, serving a life sentence, the Greek mafia continues to plead not guilty to murder, saying he spends his life in prison for a crime he swears he did not commit…
Velentzas remains almost unknown even in the US. This has always been his great ability to go unnoticed. Much of the biographical information about him has been revealed by the struggling journalist Jerry Capeci in his book "Gang Land".
Police correspondent Capeci has been writing about New York City organized crime since 1975 in both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, and he knew things better than anyone. So he tells us that Spyros arrives as a child, 14 years old, with his family in Neos Kosmos in the late 1940s, his parents, sisters and brother Dimitris, that is, looking for a better fate.
His father opened a tavern in Boston, however, closed it at some point and the family moved to New York in the 1950s. And they found new refuge in the "Greek city", as Capeci calls the Queens Astoria. The father opened another restaurant there, but the son does not want to follow in his footsteps and opens a "kafenion".
In which they play in the midnight hours a Greek game of dice, "barbut", as the journalist calls barbouti. The local Italian mafia, however, does not let him provoke, wanting its share of the gambling pie. The Lucchese had become his tight corsets, they wanted "10 thousand a month for" protection "".
And the way they asked for it left no room for the son of Greek immigrants to say no. The deal was finally completed and worked to perfection for the next 20 years. Until Velentzas becomes a "godfather".
But at a time when John Gotti's partner never opened his mouth from his cell in Illinois Jail, some 300 miles away, in an Indiana penitentiary, Velentzas began "singing" in 1994. To whom else? Jerry Capeci!
"I was the king of my own, the Greeks," he boasted in the first full-length interview he ever gave to the Daily News on October 12, 1994, "we grew up together, everyone knew me. I gave the orders. "I was the boss in Astoria."
And John Gotti knew him for sure: "I know this Spiro well. He is the leader of the Greeks ", he is heard to say in 1990 in a tape recorded by an FBI bedbug to the mobster Salvatore" Sammy Bull "Gravano. "Undoubtedly," the latter agrees.
The boss of organized crime in the Greek community of Astoria, however, did not do everything alone. His fortune and power had a lot of mafia inside them, the mighty Italian "godfathers" of New York. "I worked in construction, I had restaurants, I had pawnshops, I had cookies, I had pasta," he insisted in an interview. "I never lost a single day of work."
What Velentzas did not list were his other works, the ones he did for decades and secured him a place for a lifetime. "I made a lot of money on it gambling. "I lost everything at the racetrack," he told Capeci with an invisible smile that made the journalist notice that he certainly had not lost everything.
Stuck with Gotti for more than 25 years, protected by the Lucchese and with strong ties even with the Gambino family, Velentzas has been unbeaten all this time, having the cover of Cosa Nostra. In its heyday, it had barber shops all over Astoria, casinos in Queens and Brooklyn, and a dense network of illegal activities.
Velentzas became Velentzas working alongside the famous Greek mobster "Pete The Greek", Peter Kourakos from Mania, whose mafia tentacles had spread throughout New York. "When he died, I inherited his barbies," he confirmed to Capeci.
Under Lucchese's blessing, he set up his own small empire: "I gave them $ 10.000 a month for race halls, barbed wire and poker machines," he said in the infamous interview, confirming his suspicions. FBI.
"Really," Capeci said after their conversation in the cell, ».
Only murder will never be admitted…
Despite the many years of imprisonment Velentzas faced, what sent him to the strait for life was a murder. A 1988 murder in which Peter "Fat Pete" Chiodo, the savage Lucchese who had known Velenza for decades, named him as the perpetrator, as he was the man who went every month to collect "protection" money. .
The tall and 180-pound Fat Pete became a police parrot when the Lucchese unjustly suspected that he was nailing them to the FBI and decided to get him out of the way. And he became a parrot because at some point they tried, unsuccessfully fortunately, to kill even his sister.
"Pete Chiodo set it up for me", he claimed and continues to do so even today, at the age of 84, Velentzas, "all over the world, I am the man who hates the most. He trapped me. " Chiodo is also responsible for that almost deadly quarrel he had with the "godfather of the godmothers" in 1990 and almost caused a Greek-Italian conflict!
Chiodo had deceived him, Velentzas always says, in order to open that barbecue in the wrong place, in the area of the Gambino, who thought that the Lucchese were entering their lands and its always fragile peace was threatened. Cosa Nostra. Gotti was so angry with Velentza that he uttered the now legendary attack with his head uprooted.
"It was Fat Pete who opened it," says Velentzas, "they almost killed me. And then he blamed me. " It is a fact that the only thing the prosecutor had to convict him of murder was the testimony of Fat Pete. Go and the victim himself! In the trial for his 10 crimes, however, the court acquitted him of the murder, ending in a right impasse. Only Velentzas said to roll one more roll. And he lost.
The murder involved an old friend of the Greek "godfather", Sarecho "Sammy the Arab" Nalo, a legendary jewelry thief who had orchestrated the huge riff at the Pierre Hotel in 1972 with a loot of $ 4 million. Nalo was shot while talking on the phone in Velentza's office at a "godfather" travel agency in Queens. At the other end of the line was Velentzas himself, from his house, who even heard the deadly shots.
Nalo did not die immediately. "Call an ambulance, I do not think I can do it," he told police who arrived at the scene, according to court documents. "Who did it?" A policeman asked him. "Spiro Velentzas," Nalo replied. His testimony, however, was not accepted as evidence in the court of first instance court.
Velentzas was sentenced to 8-20 years in prison for his crimes. Defendant Kevin McGrath considered the sentence too small for him, so he asked the judge to include Nalo's murder in his verdict for Velentza, thus adding years to the final sentence.
The "godfather" rolled his dice: he asked for a retrial of the murder case, for which he was acquitted with 8-4 votes, as we said, only in the new trial he was found guilty and ate for life. And it was the lifelong shackles that pushed him to open his mouth and speak to the journalist who knew the mafia out and about.
According to his own version of what happened that day on October 6, 1988, it was again Chiodo who got the thief out of the way, as he could not repay a $ 100.000 loan. But why did Nalo name him as the perpetrator and not Fat Pete?
"For six months I wondered why Sammy the Arab said such a thing," Velentzas confessed, "I guess at that time he believed I had set it up for him, because no one knew we would meet except me." The Court of Appeal did not reduce his sentence, as it did not accept his own version of the story.
No one knows what has become of Velenza's all-powerful criminal syndicate in the 1980s and 1990s. Did it pass into other Greek hands? Was it finally absorbed by the Italian gangsters?
Probably not, as an Italian mobster had admitted a few years earlier: "These Greeks know the game so well that they will leave us without a job!"