Mafia Bust Mugshots Miss Almost All of the Good Nicknames

"Pepe," via TPM

Talking Points Memo has constructed an informative and visually pleasing slideshow of mugshots from January's "Biggest Mob Bust Ever," which we noted at the time both for its epic corralling of suspected criminals, but more playfully for its collection of some of the greatest nicknames ever given to overweight Italian-American men. Unfortunately, in the TPM round-up of the alleged mobsters, only 14 of the 120-plus arrested make the cut to be models and most of our favorite brotherhood handles don't get a face put to the silly name.

But along with "Pepe," to the right, who makes our cut for his brutal black eye, we did get a couple of our chosen ones.

Here, for example, is Vincent Aulisi, also known as "The Vet," who squeaked by at number 20 on our Top 20 list. He's looking sad, but like he could handle a barking dog, if you know what we mean:

And "The Beach," our number 18, not looking too wavy:
The rest in the slideshow all seem to be nicknamed "Tony" or "Eddie." It's possible that the rest are floating around, courtesy of the U.S. Marshals Service, but we're sure "Junior Lollipops" and "Lumpy" look better in our imaginations.

Mafia Mugshots [TPM]

[jcoscarelli@villagevoice.com / @joecoscarelli]