Capozzalo was marked for death by Luchese crime boss Vittorio (Vic) Amuso in an ill-conceived attempt to convince her brother, Peter (Fat Pete) Chiodo, to change his mind about testifying at Amuso’s then-upcoming racketeering and murder trial. Amuso is one of those hot-headed gangsters who don’t always think things through. Capozzalo was shot in the neck and back in front of her home in 1992 after dropping two of her children off at school. Spinelli drove the van that carried the shooter. Had his sister died, it’s hard not to imagine Chiodo being even more eager to testify against his old friends.

Baldy Mike’s participation in the shooting earned him a place in the Luchese family. He was officially inducted at a makeshift ritual in a bathroom at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was being held on racketeering and murder charges. Spinelli’s inductors had to do without the gun and knife, props in the traditional ceremony, and instead of a picture of a Catholic saint, they set toilet paper afire in his hands as he swore undying allegiance to the family.

Spinelli, 45, isn’t likely to resurface until 2027, if he lives that long. The new sentence was tacked onto the 13 years he still has to serve for other violent crimes. In a prepared statement, Spinelli with a straight face and no sign of remorse said he hoped his sentencing would bring closure to his and Capozzalo’s families. “They’ve both suffered enough,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the sentencing judge’s sentiments were similar to the pervasive view of the shooting in many corners of Gang Land.

“This is not just another criminal living and dying by the sword or a gun,” said Brooklyn U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie. “This is really an unthinkable act of cowardice” that broke one of the “rules that just aren’t broken” and is a “black indelible mark (on the Luchese crime family) that will never be washed away.”

Three days later, on June 11, in a federal courthouse 60 miles away, a Luchese mobster who once did much of the dirty work for a mob-linked carting company got a shorter stretch for the same crime. Jody Calabrese, 37, who pleaded guilty, got 10 years for his role in the attempted hit on Capozzalo, as well as the attempted murder of a salesman for a rival garbage hauler Calabrese shot five times in 1997. He’s due out of prison in 2006.

In a plea bargain, Calabrese admitted his roles in both shootings and in two extortion attempts. Prosecutors expected his sentence to be between 135 and 168 months under federal sentencing guidelines. But Calabrese’s lawyer, Joel Winograd, convinced Hauppauge, N.Y., U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley that because both shooting victims did not suffer permanent injuries and because Calabrese had no prior criminal convictions, the guidelines called for less, somewhere between 108 and 135 months.

Spinelli drove the van that carried gunman Dino Basciano to the Gravesend, Brooklyn, street where Capozzalo was ambushed. Calabrese and another mobster, Gregory Cappello — who died in prison two years ago while serving time for unrelated crimes — were in a “crash car” that tailed the van and was ready to block police or other pursuers.

Spinelli’s brother Robert drove a “switch car” that took the hit team to safety after they ditched the van. He was also convicted and is to be sentenced next month.

Gregory DePalma flourished in those halcyon mobster days before federal racketeering cases.

In 1976, a smiling DePalma stood between Frank Sinatra and Mafia boss Paul Castellano for the now-infamous backstage photo with Carlo Gambino and other mobsters that would later be used to bolster tape-recorded evidence against DePalma and 10 others in a bankruptcy fraud case.

On June 11, hooked to intravenous tubes and breathing through an oxygen mask, the aging Gambino gangster, who unwittingly helped the feds make a racketeering case against John A. “Junior” Gotti, lay helpless in a sparsely furnished hospital room as he was sentenced to six years in prison.

White Plains, N.Y., U.S. District Judge Barrington Parker had traveled to the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla to put a cap on DePalma’s criminal career.

DePalma, 67, suffers from cancer, diabetes and a host of other ailments. He could have received up to 13 years, but Parker cited DePalma’s failing health in departing from the normal sentencing guidelines.

But a few hours later, back at the White Plains Courthouse, Parker showed no mercy for DePalma’s mobster son Craig DePalma, meting out the harshest sentence he could for the 33-year-old: 87 months.

“You saw what your father’s life was like and you saw what that life brought upon your family, particularly the women, [yet] you cast your lot with Gotti and associates,” said Parker.

The DePalmas implicated themselves and Junior Gotti in numerous crimes in hundreds of conversations tape-recorded from 1995 to 1997. In an ironically memorable one, Junior and Craig made fun of the elder DePalma’s propensity to get caught on tape.

All three pleaded guilty to racketeering charges that included loan sharking and extortion practiced on workers and owners of Scores, a trendy Manhattan strip joint popular with celebrities, sports figures and tourists.

Junior gets his turn before Judge Parker next month. Like Craig DePalma, he faces up to 87 months. Like DePalma, Gotti saw what his father’s life was like and opted to follow in his footsteps, even to the point of getting caught on tape.

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hey, we’ll accept endorsements from anybody

No matter what the feds say about Murray Kufeld, a longtime buddy of Bonanno family consigliere Anthony Spero, Gang Land thinks you gotta like the guy.

Kufeld, who shares Spero’s love of racing pigeons, was called as a witness at Spero’s recent detention hearing in an effort by prosecutor Jim Walden to buttress his assertion that Kufeld carried messages from Spero to underlings at a Bath Beach, Brooklyn, social club a block from Spero’s pigeon coops.

Kufeld denied any improprieties, but admitted under grilling by Walden that he knew many people the prosecutor identified as mobsters, including Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, insisting however that he never knew any of them to commit any crimes.

“Where have you seen Mr. Massino?” demanded Walden.

“In the newspapers and in [Jerry Capeci's] ‘Gang Land,’” said Kufeld.

Trying to convince dad @JonHuntsman to run for mayor of NYC. Thoughts? #whynot?

— Abby Huntsman (@HuntsmanAbby) May 17, 2012

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.

But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.

“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”

I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.

The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.

The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!

The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.

I asked her a few questions about “endangered local signage.”

How are you defining “Vernacular Typography”?

I guess it should technically be Vernacular “Lettering,” but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn’t have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it’s just any visual representation of language.

How do you think New York City’s vernacular typography differs from other cities around the country and the world?

New York’s vernacular typography is unmatched in terms of intensity and variety of signage. On any given block, you can see the city’s forgotten history through the layers of still-visible signage in basically any medium. The typescape is also much denser than in other places because the city evolves so rapidly and retail turnover is so high.

Which New York City typefaces are your current favorites?

I’m partial to the type and signs I grew up seeing every day, most of which have disappeared (Gertel’s Bakery) or whose surfaces seem to be slowly melting away (Ideal Hosiery).

I love any type that somehow still clings to life or relates directly to a time and place (Horn & Hardart Automat).

And of course, you can never go wrong with beautiful neon (Montero’s).

What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A sense of the city’s history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don’t see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

I think there’s less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there’s less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

View the slide show

But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!