Angelo Mercurio

Angelo "Sonny" Mercurio (1936 – December 11, 2006) was an Italian-American mobster and a member of the Patriarca crime family who became an FBI informant that recorded for the first time a mafia induction ceremony.

Born in the West End section of Boston, Mercurio grew up working in the family bakery in Malden, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the Irish American Winter Hill gangsters and FBI informants Whitey Bulger and Steve Flemmi gave his girl money every week.

Bulger and Flemmi thought they might be able to flip him for their handler, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent John Connolly.

The FBI gathered enough evidence to indict Mercurio and others for extorting a couple of elderly bookmakers for a quarter of a million dollars.

Attendees at the ceremony included Raymond Patriarca, Jr., underboss Nicholas Bianco; consigliere Joe Russo; and caporegimes Biaggio Digiacoma, Vincent Ferrara, Matthew Guglielmetti, Dennis Lepore, and Robert Carrozza.

Mercurio said he innocently met FBI special agent, John Connolly, in the Prudential Center in the fall of 1987, after Vanessa's had been searched.

He was still disgruntled from the humiliation of being successfully bugged, accused the FBI of trying to plant evidence during their secret forays into the store and bragged that the Mafia had outsmarted them.

Connolly calmly rattled off the name of the Patriarca crime family's inside source for law enforcement information.

Mercurio had unknowingly confirmed that the Patriarca crime family had a law enforcement source, and he knew what it meant if the FBI exposed his Top Echelon Informant status.

Despite his obvious role in the attempted murder of Frank Salemme, it was significantly less time than J. R. Russo, Vincent Ferrara and Robert Carrozza received.

In June 1997, Mercurio was brought back to Boston from prison in Georgia to testify in the trial of Patriarca boss Frank Salemme.