Results tagged “johnd”

It turns out that Thursday's take down of 62 mob figures, many of them high-ranking members of the Gambino crime family and called the biggest mob bust in decades, was spurred by a Staten Island trucking company owner. Joseph Vollaro, who made a lot of money for the Gambinos, ended up becoming a government informant after being caught in a drug deal.

John D'Amato, a prominent Staten Island attorney, died of a heart attack yesterday; the 52-year-old had been jogging near his Dongan Hills home. D'Amato, a lawyer and lobbyist, had been appointed as the NYC campaign manager for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. (He had hosted a fund-raiser for Governor Spitzer's campaign last year, though.) The Staten Island Advance writes:

John D'Amato was a titan on Staten Island -- one of the most ambitious, aggressive and influential of the borough's native sons...He spearheaded the ongoing lawsuit against the alleged Saudi Arabian financiers of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and achieved a landmark $75 million national settlement from the maker of the painkiller OxyContin-- the Island's largest-ever civil case. And though neither fight was successful, he was a key player in the city's bid to host the 2012 Olympics and in the borough's controversial lobby for a proposed NASCAR track on the West Shore.

According to his biography on his law firm's website, D'Amato "attended undergraduate at Ohio State University where he was awarded an athletic scholarship and was a member of the 1975 Rose Bowl Football Team." And he had been inducted into Staten Island's Sports Hall of Fame.

The Staten Island Advance reports that work has begun to stabilize the retaining wall that collapsed late Monday in the Dongan Hills neighborhood. Five homes were evacuated after a 50'-by-50' chunk of wall - including boulders - fell downwards from a wall built to support John D'Amato's home, hitting other homes; luckily no one was hurt. D'Amato is notable for two reasons: 1) One neighbor complained that the wall was built illegally back in 2002 and 2) D'Amato is the NYC chairman of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.

Five families are homeless after a 50 foot by 50 foot part of a retaining wall collapsed late Monday in the Dongan Hills section of Staten Island It turns out that the wall, which is 200 feet long, was built without a permit and that the owner of the wall happens to be John D'Amato, lobbying partner of Guy Molinari and the head of Rudy Giuliani's NYC campaign. Nice one, D'Amato!

A woman who had recently left her husband and moved in with her daughter was shot by the estranged husband in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. The husband then killed himself. Karen Skellas had been accepting a housewarming gift from coworker John D'Atri when Ioannis Skellas appeared. D'Atri told reporters, "From out of nowhere this person appears with a hood over his head. In the blink of an eye, he came towards her and fired." Mr. Skellas had a sawed-off shotgun in his sweatshirt and fired at the housewarming gift - bags of groceries. After the couple yelled at each other, the husband fatally shot his wife in the head. A neighbor tells the NY Times that Mr. Skellas then ran away. He reloaded his gun, returned to Mrs. Skellas's body, and shot himself.

Forbes has a fun nauseating feature on the homes of billionaires, and three of them are in New York (okay, one is in the Hamptons, but to a Billionaire With a Helicopter, that's practically one of the five-boroughs):

When billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg was elected, he declined to live in Gracie Mansion, preferring his own luxury digs nearby. Built in 1889, Bloomberg's townhouse has five floors and totals 7,500 square feet--including the chunk of the building next door, which he bought to enlarge his dining room. He paid $3.5 million in 1986, and today the house is worth many times that. Hizzoner also owns properties in Bermuda, London, Vail, Colo., and North Salem, N.Y.

Continue reading "Billionaire Homes: Pretty Nice"

The town of Weehawken pulled out all the stops for the reenactment: Hamilton and Burr arrived by boat (from Floating the Apple), just as their forefathers did, for the duel, and arranged tours of Burr's and Hamilton's houses. And it was all-Hamilton this weekend at the NY Times: Ron Chernow's Op-Ed piece about Hamilton is excellent ("). Chernow has just completed a book about Alexander Hamiltion (Gothamist also recommends his books, The House of Morgan about J.P., etc., and Titan about John D. Rockefeller). The Times magazine's Hamilton piece by Ted Widmer referenced the move to replace Hamilton on the $10 bill with Reagan.