Married to the Mob: 10 Hollywood Stars With Ties to the Mafia

Robert De Niro has alleged ties to the Gambino clan. To prepare for his role in Analyze This, he spent time with mobster Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano. Anthony Corozzo, an associate of the family, was an extra on the film and reportedly introduced the two heavyweights.

De Niro is said to have gotten into Ruggiano's mind to play the neurotic mobster in the 1999 film. The actor later insisted he didn’t recall taking a widely circulated photo with Ruggiano, apparently in De Niro’s trailer on the film set.

Cabaret icon Liza Minnelli is said to have dated actor and former low-level mobster Gianni Russo. There are claims that the Gambinos persuaded Francis Ford Coppola to cast Russo as Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather, but he also served as the intermediary between Paramount Studios and New York Mafia don Joe Colombo Sr.

Russo claimed to have bedded Marilyn Monroe when he was 16 years old. He also claimed to have “had threesomes” with Minnelli and a Vegas showgirl.

Madonna used to date former Miami club king and mobster Chris Paciello. Later, he was convicted of racketeering and sent to prison for ten years for a Mafia-related murder. Paciello was also famous for ratting out the upper echelon of the Colombo and Bonanno crime families.

Reportedly, Madonna’s ex-girlfriend Ingrid Casares accompanied him to Mob meetings so it wouldn’t be a surprise if she still had some connections with the Mafia.

Reports came out in 1980 that accused Wayne Newton of using his co-ownership of the Aladdin Hotel (which later became Planet Hollywood) to act as a “frontman” for the Mafia.

Even worse, other reports said that the star “was spilling the beans about the Mafia to law enforcement officials.” While Newton insisted that he was ignorant of any wrongdoings, there was danger in the fact that, as he explained, “the mobsters didn’t know that I didn’t know anything about them.”

Things got worse for Newton when he was listed as a “government witness” in the trial of reputed mobsters Guido Penosi and Frank Piccolo, which resulted in a “Mafia death threat.” The singer, who was given a bulletproof vest by authorities to protect him from a hit, reportedly told his wife, “I’m a dead man.”

Luckily for the star, he survived the ordeal, although it probably had him reconsidering any connection he may have had to organized crime.

Steven Seagal claimed he didn’t know he’d been working for the Mob for over a decade.

In 2000, the martial arts expert decided not to make any more violent films, due to his newfound spirituality. The bad news was that his business partner, Julius Nasso, was heavily involved with the Gambino family.

Needless to say, Nasso and his gangster buddies didn’t like this move one bit because they stood to lose lots of cash. The gangsters apparently tried to strong-arm Seagal into not only making more films but also paying extortion fees for films he had previously made with Nasso’s financial help. Seagal went on to be a government witness in the trial against Peter Gotti (and some other gangsters) and still went on to make violent movies.

Whether it was the pressure from the Mob, or just Seagal’s own judgment that brought him back to the silver screen, he was not saying.

This British bombshell was reportedly in a 2001 relationship with Colombo capo Dominic “Donnie Shacks” Montemarano, a convicted enforcer who served 11 years in prison for racketeering. The rumor claimed they met on the set of the Mafia movie Mickey Blue Eyes, which Elizabeth Hurley produced.

They were seen around Tinseltown holding hands and dining together. Montemarano was under scrutiny by the FBI for allegedly tampering with college football games in an attempt to fix matches at UCLA. The charges were dropped, but the FBI supposedly kept tabs on his activities for years.

GoodFellas star Joe Pesci has ties to the Genoveses. It was also alleged that in 1982, fellow actor James Caan hired mobsters to rough up Pesci over an $8,000 Miami hotel bill that he allegedly walked out on.

This resulted in a beef between the actors that became so heated that Caan allegedly contacted a gangster to “investigate” the problem with Pesci in a more detailed manner. Caan and Pesci ended up burying the hatchet before things got out of control.

Al Pacino has been casually linked with the Genovese crime family, although more detailed information on their relations is not available to the general public.

There’s a possibility that actors like Pacino and Caan have nailed their portrayals of Mafia and gang members by hanging out with actual crime family members and absorbing the way they talk and communicate with one another.

Football legend Joe Namath has been connected to both the Gambinos and the Luccheses through his seedy Upper East Side bar, Bachelors III. So many bookies, loan sharks and mobsters came through the doors that the NFL ordered Namath to sell his stake in the club! In 1967, the FBI created a dossier on Namath, a new entry in a list known as “Hoover’s Files.”

They later received information that he frequented the Pussycat Bar in New York City.

It is understood that the Pussycat was actually owned by Carmine Tramunti, a member of the Lucchese family, and was heavily saturated with a Mob presence.

Though it doesn’t seem like Joe got too deep inside the world of crime (allegations of him fixing games were never substantiated), former linebacker Jack Lambert, a close friend of Namath, put Joe’s Mob involvement this way: “Joe just likes excitement. (He) liked to be involved in dangerous things."