In the new book “Little Vic and the Great Mafia War,” former New York Daily News reporter Larry McShane delves into the 1990s gangland war that pitted infamous mobster Victor “Little Vic” Orena against Carmine “The Snake” Persico for control of the Colombo crime family, triggering one of the the bloodiest episodes in New York City history.
It was a perfect Long Island evening, with the temperature in the mid-70s and the promise of another sweet suburban summer lying in the months ahead.
Little Vic Orena walked into the warm night air on June 20, 1991, after sharing dinner with a friend inside Stella’s Restaurant, a popular spot among the local mafiosi. He climbed inside his two-door Mercedes convertible and started the engine. A set of rosary beads hung from his rear view mirror, a gift from his deeply religious wife’s pilgrimage to the tiny village of Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina — a site where true believers first reported witnessing visions of the Virgin Mary a decade earlier.
The sky above was clear, but the rising storm inside the Colombo crime family was once again poised to unleash a tsunami of trouble across its perpetually-divided membership. Orena lit a cigarette with his solid gold lighter and popped his soundtrack from Broadway’s “The Phantom of the Opera” into the car’s tape player before heading out. As the mob veteran stopped at a red light near his two-story family home in Cedarhurst, Long Island, he turned his head to the right and noticed an older vehicle with four men inside — each wearing a baseball cap.
The faces beneath the hats belonged to his crime family colleagues. Orena’s once-loyal associates were now lying in wait for the family’s latest acting boss as a growing rift over his ascension to the top sparked a new round of infighting for a mob family already notorious for settling its disputes the old-fashioned way: Backstabbing, bullets, and bloodshed.
“They had a hole already dug for his body,” recalled his son, Andrew Orena. “And thankfully, my father had a good sixth sense.”
Orena, in a lucky and life-saving break, arrived home sooner than expected by the waiting hit squad. Little Vic identified one of the would-be killers as his longtime friend and recently-promoted family consiglieri, Carmine “The Shadow” Sessa.
The would-be assassin had earned his nickname from the Orena sons, who noted Sessa seemed to appear out of nowhere — “Way before his shadow,” said Andrew.
The failed scheme was both business and personal. Sessa was once tight with the Orenas — treated like a member of the family, occasionally popping in and joining Little Vic for a cup of coffee, freshly brewed for the occasion by the boss’s wife inside their home. It was the acting boss who hand-picked Sessa to join him atop the family hierarchy.
But Sessa’s was not the only betrayal. The Orenas had shared a long and lucrative alliance with the power behind the hit: The legendary and longtime boss Carmine Persico — “Junior” to his allies, “the Snake” to his haters. The two clans were like family outside the crime family, their ties inside and outside the Colombos grown tight across two generations. The families worked side by side inside and outside the mob, frequently socializing as sons from both sides followed their fathers into “The Life.”
“The Persico and Orena families were as close as you can be in that life,” recalled Vic’s son Andrew, sitting inside his Long Island home with brother John a full thirty years after the last killing in the war. “My brother John and Michael Persico were business partners and best friends. Michael was godfather to John’s son, John Jr.”
But stability, never a Colombo family trademark, once more proved elusive for its made members and their leadership in the aftermath of Persico’s combined 139-year sentences following a pair of mid-1980s convictions in separate Manhattan trials, with the jailed boss destined to die behind bars yet reluctant to surrender the throne.
And so Carmine Persico, from behind bars, initially appointed an acting replacement before signing off on the recently promoted mobster’s murder within two years.
Persico then bumped Orena up as the new acting boss, putting the well-regarded and hand-picked veteran in charge in a seamless 1988 transfer of power. It was, for Little Vic, the pinnacle of a career that began decades before as a teen with a zip gun on Patchen Avenue in Brooklyn. And now, three years after rising to the seat of power without twisting a single arm or pulling one trigger, Orena found himself in the crosshairs of the Persico loyalists.
The Snake, indeed. The scenario, if nothing else, offered a perfect illustration of Carmine’s hated nickname. Persico was now advocating for his son, Little Allie Boy, to take over as boss upon his upcoming release from prison after an earlier conviction alongside his father.
Richard Corkery/New York Daily News
Alphonse Persico arrives at the District Attorney’s office in 1972.
Sessa, recently flipped to the Persico squad, was particularly motivated by word of a reported plan by Little Vic to assassinate him after a Colombo Family induction ceremony to take place the next day. The outnumbered Orena hung a fast U-turn near his two-story suburban home, one hand on the wheel and the other on a handgun, speeding to safety before his hunters could open fire.
There was no doubt where the murder plot originated, an attack marking the end of Orena’s decades-long alliance with the Persicos and the kickoff of a devastating internal family bloodletting unseen inside the New York mafia since the last Colombo war only two decades earlier.
From “Little Vic” by Larry McShane, reprinted with permission from Kensington Books. Copyright 2025.
