William D'Elia
| Billy D'Elia | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 24, 1946 Trenton, New Jersey, U.S. |
William "Big Billy" D'Elia (born June 24, 1946) is a Pennsylvania mobster and leader of the Bufalino crime family.
D'Elia began working with the Bufalino family in the late 1960s as boss Russell Bufalino's driver. D'Elia's business background in solid waste brokering and other areas would later be useful in making contacts in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Rising through the ranks, D'Elia was said to be a mediator among mob families, meeting frequently with mobsters from the Philadelphia crime family, Western Pennsylvania, and New York City. D'Elia lives in Hughestown, Pennsylvania with his wife Ellen. They have a son Russell named after Bufalino, and two adult daughters, Carolyn named after Bufalino's wife and Miriam, an attorney in Philadelphia.
Succeeding Edward Sciandra in 1994, D'Elia expanded the organization into legitimate operations such as waste management and controlling shares of Spanel Transportation and the Newcastle Group, the latter of which is a suspected money laundering operation. He lives in Pittston, Pennsylvania. He stands at 6'3" and weighs 210 pounds with brown eyes.
In 1990, Bufalino was implicated in a money laundering operation involving The Metro, a newspaper in Exeter, Pennsylvania. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) charged that over $3.0 million in drug and prostitution money was hidden as revenue from fictional Metro newspaper ads and subscriptions. The Metro closed in 1998.
On May 31, 2001, IRS agents, US Postal Service Inspectors, and Pennsylvania State Police obtained search warrants for the homes of several Bufalino crime family members, including D'Elia and his mistress. The agents seized records relevant to a tax evasion investigation from which D'Elia claimed a loss of $6 million while reporting $8,000 in gambling operations in Atlantic City, New Jersey. On February 26, 2003, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission banned D'Elia from entering any Atlantic City, New Jersey casinos and he remains on the Exclusion List of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.
...
Wikipedia