Albanian Mafia Mobsters Show Flair for Aliases

Albanian Mafia meet

By Aaron Rutkoff,wsj

Few things delight New Yorkers like a colorful criminal nickname — Charlie Cream Cheese and Joey Cupcakes are only a few notable examples from the past.

So a drug-smuggling indictment unsealed Wednesday by federal prosecutors was a veritable midsummer buffet of loopy, weird and just plain puzzling monikers given to the ethnic Albanian men allegedly involved.

There was Shkelqim Bakraqi, occasionally known as “Juicehead,” and Joseph Bux, who went by “Trailer,” “Trash” and “Jo-Jo.” (Like Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes.) There were not one but two fellows known as “Arty” and one “Marty,” along with a pair of “Big Brians.” (There’s also a man named Brian, who helpfully goes by the nickname “Van Damme.”)

And there are poor Angelo Germano and Alberto Mercado, known as “Fat Ange” and “Fat Boy,” respectively.

Members of group come from “several inter-related ethnic Albanian family clans (also known as ‘fis’),” prosecutors said in a statement. The Albanian mob is relatively new in New York, but the changing nature of criminal nationalities does not alter the ingenious charm of their nicknames.

How do these Albanians match up to some of New York’s great organized-crime nicknames of the past?

Back in January, when the FBI rounded up more than 100 alleged mobsters from the more familiar ethnic Italian syndicates, the indictments contained an unmatched treasury of aliases. The Village Voice did yeoman’s work in selecting 20 of the best, including such distinctive monikers as “Andy Mush,” “Cheeks,” “Pooch,” “Vinny Carwash” and “Tony Bagels.”

Likewise, this 2004 story from the New York Times on the mob history of Harlem’s Pleasant Avenue has many classic examples of the genre: 

Everyone on Pleasant Avenue had a nickname that usually stuck till death. (Except for Johnny Lend-Me-Twenty, whose nickname changed over the decades with inflation. Now he’s Johnny Lend-Me-Thirty.)

 

Some guys were named after body parts: Alfred Ears, Gary High-Eye, Vinnie and Frankie Head (no relation), Frankie Nose and Danny Legs, for example. Others were named for food: Charlie Cream Cheese, Freddy Eggs, Tommy Salami (currently a busboy at Rao’s), Joe Olive and Mary Knish. Still others were named for animals: Jimmy the Cat, Vito the Bat, Johnny Fox and Gary the Lamb. Rats? They never lasted long on Pleasant Avenue.

 

And sometimes the nickname was all there was. An elderly guy named Waffles was taken one day to the hospital, but when his lifelong friends tried visiting, they could not find his room because none of them knew his real name. ”If you didn’t have a nickname, no one knew who you were,” said Joseph Camerlingo, 77, a retired

Back in 2005, Slate looked into the origins of mobster nicknames. In some cases, they come from media coverage or even law enforcement – and not all criminals like the aliases that stick to them.

For more on New York City’s Albanian mob, check out this three–part series from the website Capital New York, which is by far the most detailed look at the origins and current state of groups that have become an increasingly big focus of law enforcement.