​​Cops are on the lookout for a man wearing a Scarface jacket (no, really), and say that he and another man recently robbed a Bronx newsstand at gunpoint.

Around 7:15 p.m. on Jan. 6, the two suspected perps entered the shop at 1936 Crotona Avenue, and pulled out black handguns. The suspects, pictured here, took cash from the register and scratch-off lotto tickets, law enforcement officials say. They fled on foot.

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Forget smuggling, prostitution and extortion; the real money is in Medicare fraud.

​Medicare is struggling with serious problems already -- ballooning costs and an ideologically hostile Republican Party, to name just two. But at least for the moment it no longer has to tangle with the Armenian mob. Armen Kazarian, an Armenian gangster, pleaded guilty in Manhattan Federal court today to racketeering charges brought in connection to the largest Medicare fraud in history.

Kazarian and 43 other members of an Armenian organized crime network were charged in October with setting up 118 imaginary health clinics to rack up more than $100 million in billings for patients and procedures that never existed.

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P. 460: Carlo Gambino

​An old Mafia file found in a black bag in the back of a New York City cab in the early '90s containing mug shots, criminal histories, lists of associates, kids' and wives' names, and the favorite hangouts of 843 Mafia members in the '50s and '60s -- a trove of fascinating historical information for the Mafia buff -- is up for auction at Bonhams today as part of their "Fine Books and Manuscripts" listing. It's a departure from the leather-bound first editions you might expect, cased in a "black cloth binder with tabs, title stamped in green to upper cover." Its 844 pages have been thumbed.

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​A plot to kill a member of a Russian crime family got the man known as Tony D. sentenced today in Manhattan federal court to 10 years in prison. Anthony Palumbo, a "soldier and acting capo" in the Genovese family, had been running his organization's petroleum interests with Russians since 1990, and a few years later tried to get a hitman "taken care of" for some Slavic co-conspirators. Though the murder never happened, Palumbo is also tied to a 1992 homicide of a fellow Genovese associate and pleaded guilty "to commit murder in aid of a racketeering enterprise" in 2010. "Anthony Palumbo's decades long crime spree has finally come to an end," said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. "He is going to prison which is exactly where he belongs." [FBI]

​Mobsters have a special way of speaking that is all their own, which you probably already know, having watched any number of the excellent mafia-themed films available on Netflix and your various cable channels. The New York Times has an intriguing look into some of the more "esoteric" of those expressions, as revealed by secretly recorded conversations between Vincent Basciano and mob boss Joseph Massino during Basciano's trial for the murder of Randolph Pizzolo. There are many colorful terms and phrases!

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"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.

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​Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano, the former Bonanno crime-family boss who's facing new charges of murdering a mob associate while currently serving a life sentence on another conviction, will not be just some schlub at trial. The New York Post reports that his "perfectly coiffed hair" will be paired with a garment choice from among five coordinated business outfits made available on each day of his upcoming capital-murder trial, as ordered by a federal judge.

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Vincent "No Good" Young

Don't count out the Mafia. Tom Robbins gives a sobering appraisal of why the Italian-American gangsters are more than just pop-culture figures.

But they're also pretty potent pop-culture pricks. Gangs of other colors and races are also dangerous, but Joe Coscarelli's list of Mafia nicknames from the recent big bust shows that when it comes to nicknames, Italian gangsters still have an edge over black gangsters.

There are exceptions. Just yesterday, feds in New Jersey indicted a bunch of Bloods for racketeering and other felonies. Topping the list is Vincent "No Good" Young. He's so bad that even one of his other nicknames, "Good," is simply a shortened version of "No Good." More >>

​ There are thousands of pages to wade through, but so far the catch of the day in the 127-defendant Mobapalooza takedown by the feds is a caught-on-tape conversation in which a mobster describes how he took care of a major menace: his mother-in-law.

Peter Pace Jr., a Genovese crime family associate with a 30-year-long rap sheet, was captured on tape in a January 21, 2008 rap describing how he handled things:

"I tried to throw her off the roof on Viewmont Avenue back in 1988. She was a fucking junkie, right? So now...she's fucking telling everybody that I'm gonna come rob everybody, set me up with the neighborhood, right? So I brought her up to the fucking roof, about six stories, it was fucking, I hung her off the fucking side of the roof."

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​News came down this morning about the FBI's largest organized crime bust in New York history, in which raids resulted in the arrest of over 100 alleged mobsters from all five crime families including the Gambinos, Genoveses, Luccheses, Bonannos and Colombos. Charges run the gamut from murder to gambling and the ol' standby, racketeering, and now WNYC has the full list of indictments. Digitally thumbing through the documents, two things are initially clear: this thing is huge (16 indictments in all) and none of them share my last name. The other thing that jumps out is that these dudes have great nicknames. Here are 20 of our favorites:

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