Nick The Blade
A Gangster's Gangster
The six-foot-four, 250-pound East Liberty mob enforcer was caught on camera snorting cocaine with one hand while urinating off a balcony with the other. The footage of Eugene “Nick the Blade” Gesuale was captured as part of an FBI investigation into Pittsburgh’s Mafia in the 1980s. The fearsome narcotics kingpin was a John Belushi type and ladies man — albeit with a severe violent streak — who loved to party and spend money. One FBI agent said the crude mobster had absolutely no redeeming qualities. But Nick the Blade didn’t care, he was an old school mafiaso who made his bones in the 1960s, carved out a drug empire in the 1980s, spent almost 30 years in federal prison for his prohibition-related crimes and even earned a mention in a famous gangster film.
“Nick the Blade’s pop-culture claim to fame is that he was the infamous ‘Pittsburgh connection’ from the Oscar-nominated film Goodfellas,” says Scott Burnstein, author of Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family and the Bloody Fall of La Cosa Nostra. “He supplied wholesale cocaine to real-life New York Lucchese mob associates Henry Hill, James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke and Thomas “Two-Gun Tommy” DeSimone, portrayed by Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci respectively.
After dropping out of Central Catholic High School in the 10th grade in1959, Gesuale learned to cut hair at the Pittsburgh Beauty Academy — a skill he’d later put to use in prison. But a stylist’s salary wasn’t enough for young man, he wanted money and power, and when drugs came into the equation, he became a very scary dude. By the end of the hippie era, Nick the Blade was calling the shots in Pittsburgh, dealing heroin and serving as “top muscle” for the crime family, according to law enforcement. Police arrested him 13 times between 1959 and 1981, but none of these legal run-ins resulted in a conviction for one simply reason: Witnesses refused to testify.
“He earned his nickname from a pair of altercations in his youth when he attacked two separate men with a knife,” Burnstien says. “One stemmed from someone looking at his girlfriend at a movie theatre; the other involved a fight after a basketball game.” Nick the Blade, according to Gangster Report, was also the prime suspect in the December 1967 gangland slaying of Pittsburgh mob flunky Alphonse Marano, a hit informants told the government that he “made his bones” on.
Marano introduced an undercover IRS agent to underboss Joseph “Jo-Jo” Pecora, who was in charge of West Virginia’s rackets and casinos. Pittsburgh Don Michael Genovese blamed Marano for the subsequent bust, loss of revenue, and infiltration and arrest of his crew, and Marano subsequently was found dead, shot three times in the back of the head, in the trunk of his car. Gesuale was questioned by detectives but never charged.
Between 1978 and 1982, Gesuale made in excess of $1 million from his illicit ventures, the IRS determined. This enabled the mobster to rent a $1,200-a-month penthouse in Highland Park, dine at Pittsburgh’s finest restaurants, fly first-class, wear a different pair of Gucci shoes everyday, drive Cadillacs and Jaguars, pay cash for Las Vegas gambling sprees, and buy his girlfriends expensive gifts at New York boutiques, prosecutors said.
The indictment spelling his doom was filed in January 1985 and included Pagan motorcycle gang boss Daniel “Danny the Deacon” Zwibel, Pittsburgh Press truck driver Roy Ingold — who later testified against him — and Pittsburgh wiseguy John “Johnny Three Fingers” Leone. Before the indictment dropped Gesuale was tipped off by FBI secretary Jacqueline Wymard, through her boyfriend, mobster John Carrabba, enabling Nick tthe Blade to flee.
On January 4, 1985, a fugitive warrant was issued for his arrest, and Gesuale landed on the U.S. Marshals Top 15 Most Wanted list. The feds claimed he fled with more than $600,000 in cash and was running his drug empire from Jamaica. Knowing that Gesuale was a big gambler, investigators staked out the only two satellite dishes on the island, and they nabbed Gesuale at a Montego Bay hotel, where they found him betting on NBA games. Authorities flew him back to Pittsburgh in July 1986. Five days into his trial, Nick the Blade pled guilty, and
U.S. District Judge Donald Ziegler sentenced him to 45 years.
In prison, gangsta rapper Clifford “T.I.” Harris, who served time with the aging Mafiaso at FCC Forrest City in Arkansas, told the old gangster that he could get millions for his story. Nick the Blade, who’d never snitched on anyone in his life and followed the code of Omertà — the Mafia code of honor and silence — to the “t”, decided he wanted a movie made about his life, a la Goodfellas. “They made a movie about that fucking rat,” he said, referring to Henry Hill, the character Ray Liota played. “They need to make one about a real gangster like me.”
After serving 28 years, Gesuale was released on October 31, 2014. Prohibited from returning to Pittsburgh, due to threats he made against law enforcement figures during his trial, Nick the Blade relocated to Florida. The 72-year-old may have been an ex-con, but he still displayed plenty of flair. “He had a Rolls Royce at the halfway house when he first got out,” a prisoner who served time with Gesuale tells me “It was a bad-ass Rolls that he bought for 100 grand in 1985. His sister held onto it that whole time for him.”
Not even two years out of prison Gesuale was at Past Times Restaurant and Bar in Ormond Beach, when he dropped over dead from a heart attack while enjoying his usual glass of Pinot Grigio. Hardly a befitting end for a once-scary mobster — who was talking movie deals till his death, but nothing ever came of it.