Murder, the Mob and the new Lady Macca: A father accused of Mafia links and claims of violence and extortion
With her understated elegance, independent fortune, aversion to the limelight and no-nonsense job as the vice-president of a large New Jersey trucking company, Nancy Shevell could not be more different from the previous Lady McCartney.
But appearances can be deceptive — particularly in a city as image-obsessed as New York. For today, the Mail can reveal that the 51-year-old New York businesswoman who has just become engaged to Sir Paul McCartney has an extraordinary history of family drama and tragedy.
Not only was her father linked with the Mafia, but her uncle shot himself in the head after his own business — which had links to the Mob — went bankrupt.
If that were not enough, after battling with a serious drug problem for much of his life, Nancy’s only brother died after overdosing on a cocktail of drugs in a Los Angeles hotel room.
Given that Miss Shevell can often be found nowadays sandwiched between the stars on the front row of a Stella McCartney fashion show, she is hardly most people’s idea of a New Jersey haulage operator. As her late brother Jon once observed, she ‘sure doesn’t look like a trucker’, further describing his little sister as a ‘supermodel in a grimy business’.
Her father, Myron ‘Mike’ Shevell, on the other hand, might be described as the quintessential tough East Coast haulage boss — and one who faced allegations of Mob connections at that.
The Shevells have been in trucking since the 1920s, when the Jewish family business transported seafood from the New Jersey coast to New York. Having worked his way up from driving delivery runs, Sir Paul’s future father-in-law started his own business in the 1960s with his brother Daniel.
The firm was based in Elizabeth — the New Jersey town where many of the scenes from the Mafia TV series The Sopranos was filmed.
Within a few years, the pair were running two major haulage companies, one of which had at least one well-known mobster on its payroll. In 1975, U.S. government officials filed fraud charges against the brothers.
The case never went to trial, but they were forced to surrender control of the companies and they later went bankrupt. Daniel’s response was dramatic, to say the least. At just 39, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
His brother Myron resurfaced in the haulage industry in 1977, taking over a struggling company called New England Motor Freight (NEMF).
He turned the business around and within a decade NEMF was one of the biggest haulage firms on America’s East Coast and Mr Shevell, a hard-headed Republican, used his wealth to fund the political aspirations of Nancy’s then husband, New York lawyer Bruce Blakeman.
Mr Blakeman’s ambitions to run for New York mayor came to nothing. But in 1988, when Nancy was in her late 20s, Mr Shevell found himself accused of using his money for rather more insidious purposes.
Following an investigation by the government’s Organised Crime Strike Force, he was accused of colluding with Vincent Gigante, the head of the Genovese family — one of New York’s five main Mafia clans — to take control of his local branch of the Teamsters trade union, which looks after thousands of blue-collar workers.
Vincent ‘the Chin’ Gigante — his nickname came from the Italian pronunciation of his real name, Vincenzo — was regarded as the most powerful mafioso in the U.S. by the early Nineties. But he later earned another nickname, ‘The Oddfather’, by wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in New York for ten years dressed in pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, muttering incoherently.
But his mental illness was exposed as a fraud after investigators recorded him lucidly planning Mob operations.
It was claimed in a racketeering lawsuit that Mr Shevell made pay-offs to the Genovese mobsters in return for a ‘sweetheart’ deal which allowed his company to operate without abiding by union rules.
This particular Teamsters branch was notorious for being the most corrupt in the U.S. Indeed, it was even run by a mobster — Tony Provenzano, a Mafia hitman who was later jailed for murder and extortion. (Provenzano’s predecessor disappeared — it is believed the Mob murdered him and put his body through a tree shredder.)
Through the union, Provenzano had been connected to two even more famous crooks — the corrupt Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared presumed murdered in 1975, and President Nixon, whom the FBI believes benefited from a £600,000 secret cash fund set up by racketeers within the Teamsters.
Provenzano and Nixon even played golf together. It has since emerged that the U.S. Justice Department believed Nixon intended to use the Teamsters’ cash as hush money for the burglars who broke into Democrat Party offices in the Watergate Hotel.
The 1988 lawsuit claimed Mr Shevell ‘cultivated’ an 11-year ‘corrupt relationship’ with Provenzano and a clutch of other mobsters.
They would not look good on a McCartney wedding guest list. The notorious Mafiosi alleged to have been involved with Shevell Snr included Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, Matty ‘The Horse’ Ianniello and Stephen Andretta.
Andretta had, together with Provenzano, been named by the FBI a few years earlier as among those believed to have abducted and murdered Jimmy Hoffa.
Ianniello, who would go on to run the entire Genovese clan after managing its vice operations, was recorded in a wire-tapped conversation suggesting that one of Mr Shevell’s trucking companies, Eastern Freight Ways (which employed Provenzano’s brother, Angelo), was a ‘front’ for the Mob.
‘Yeah, we formed a truck company,’ said Ianniello, referring to Eastern.
The government claimed that Mr Shevell’s ‘aberrant labour practices served as a conspicuously negative example of union corruption within the trucking industry’, and that his company’s racketeering activity with the union ‘tended to exacerbate the extortionate climate of intimidation’.
In the years it was run by Provenzano, drivers and company owners alike were threatened and blackmailed.
Mr Shevell, now 74, later said the lawsuit was settled without any charges of wrongdoing proved against him. However, prosecutors point out that he actually agreed to a deal whereby he was barred for five years from engaging in any union negotiations.
His run-in with the authorities does not appear to have harmed his business excessively in the years that followed. The Shevell Group now owns six trucking companies and employs 5,000 staff. Its business — carrying clothing, nappies, Kleenex tissues and basketballs across the U.S. — is worth more than $400 million a year.
Friends say Nancy Shevell is devoted to her father, particularly following the death of her mother in 1991.
As with Sir Paul — who over the years has had to contend with the early deaths of his mother, his first wife Linda and two fellow Beatles — Nancy has had more than her share of premature bereavements.
The most shattering blow came three years ago when her brother Jon died in the most squalid circumstances.
At 6ft 6in, he had played basketball for his state and professionally in Europe before joining the family company. However, he had a history of drug abuse which saw him spend increasing amounts of time away from his job. It became a compulsion which cost him his life.
On March 3, 2008, the 50-year-old was found dead in his room at the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, where he had been staying for two-and-a-half weeks.
The local coroner’s office confirmed to me this week that his death emerged only when members of his family contacted the hotel after becoming alarmed at not hearing from him. Hotel security forced their way into his room and found him lying across the foot of his bed.
Police discovered a vial of cocaine nearby, and a post-mortem report ruled he had died from ‘multi-drug intoxication’. His system contained not only cocaine but five different painkiller and tranquiliser drugs.
The devastating effect of his addiction and untimely death on his sister Nancy is reflected in the charity which she oversees — the Arlene Walters Shevell Endowment Scholarship Fund, which is named after her mother and provides self-help groups for parents with drug-addicted children, and financial support for those undergoing rehabilitation programmes.
In the same month that Nancy was shattered by the loss of her brother, her lover Paul McCartney was hit by the death of Neil Aspinall — his former band’s road manager and chief confidant, who had been dubbed the ‘fifth Beatle’.
Just as McCartney is said to have bonded with John Lennon over their shared experience of losing their mothers early in life, it seems he was drawn to Shevell (who, like Linda, fought a battle against breast cancer in the mid-1990s) by grief over their respective bereavements.
Friends say McCartney — at the time still in the throes of his divorce from Heather Mills — suggested to Nancy they go on holiday to cheer themselves up.
They flew to the Caribbean island of Antigua, where they rented a £6,000-a-night villa. They behaved like a honeymoon couple, kissing and holding hands.
Though the couple have now sustained their romance for four years, and last week announced their engagement, there is no doubt the death of Nancy’s brother has cast a long shadow over her life in recent times.
While McCartney has admitted experimenting with heroin and cocaine in the past, Nancy is thought to be far too wrapped up in her career ever to have been distracted by drugs. She has said her childhood was defined by her father’s business — the little girl even looked forward to the toy trucks he bought her without fail each holiday.
‘I used to line them up in my room, right next to my Barbies,’ she told a local newspaper.
She and her brother used to accompany their father into work at weekends and play in the truck yards while he checked on the family assets.
‘While other kids would go feed ducks in the park, we would go to our father’s truck terminals … every single weekend,’ she said.
But if her father’s business was lucrative, he refused to lavish money on his children, something Nancy’s wfiancé would no doubt approve of, given that he famously sent his children to state schools.
Though Myron Shevell could no doubt have afforded to pay for a private school and then an Ivy League university, Nancy was sent to the local high school before going on to Arizona State, where she was the only woman to major in transportation.
Although she joined the family business after she graduated, she has recalled how she had to fight for respect in the male-dominated haulage industry.
She claims a group of executives tested her every day during her first year at the family company. Once, she returned fire, questioning why a vice-president was taking someone on during a hiring freeze.
‘He started screaming and yelling at me and threw me out of his office,’ she said.
Then, displaying a steeliness which may have proved as much of a draw for Sir Paul as her beauty, she added: ‘I went right back in and told him I wouldn’t leave the office until I got an answer. I don’t know where he is right now, but I know where I am.’
There is no doubt Paul McCartney has long been drawn to strong women, and there’s no doubt his third wife-to-be — while rich in her own right and a beauty to boot — is going to be more than a match for the former Beatle.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1386907/Paul-McCartney-Murder-Mob-new-Lady-Macca.html#ixzz1MHM13Q4J
But appearances can be deceptive — particularly in a city as image-obsessed as New York. For today, the Mail can reveal that the 51-year-old New York businesswoman who has just become engaged to Sir Paul McCartney has an extraordinary history of family drama and tragedy.
United by family tragedies: Sir Paul McCartney with his new fiancee Nancy Shevell
If that were not enough, after battling with a serious drug problem for much of his life, Nancy’s only brother died after overdosing on a cocktail of drugs in a Los Angeles hotel room.
Given that Miss Shevell can often be found nowadays sandwiched between the stars on the front row of a Stella McCartney fashion show, she is hardly most people’s idea of a New Jersey haulage operator. As her late brother Jon once observed, she ‘sure doesn’t look like a trucker’, further describing his little sister as a ‘supermodel in a grimy business’.
The Shevells have been in trucking since the 1920s, when the Jewish family business transported seafood from the New Jersey coast to New York. Having worked his way up from driving delivery runs, Sir Paul’s future father-in-law started his own business in the 1960s with his brother Daniel.
The firm was based in Elizabeth — the New Jersey town where many of the scenes from the Mafia TV series The Sopranos was filmed.
Within a few years, the pair were running two major haulage companies, one of which had at least one well-known mobster on its payroll. In 1975, U.S. government officials filed fraud charges against the brothers.
The case never went to trial, but they were forced to surrender control of the companies and they later went bankrupt. Daniel’s response was dramatic, to say the least. At just 39, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
His brother Myron resurfaced in the haulage industry in 1977, taking over a struggling company called New England Motor Freight (NEMF).
He turned the business around and within a decade NEMF was one of the biggest haulage firms on America’s East Coast and Mr Shevell, a hard-headed Republican, used his wealth to fund the political aspirations of Nancy’s then husband, New York lawyer Bruce Blakeman.
Mr Blakeman’s ambitions to run for New York mayor came to nothing. But in 1988, when Nancy was in her late 20s, Mr Shevell found himself accused of using his money for rather more insidious purposes.
Following an investigation by the government’s Organised Crime Strike Force, he was accused of colluding with Vincent Gigante, the head of the Genovese family — one of New York’s five main Mafia clans — to take control of his local branch of the Teamsters trade union, which looks after thousands of blue-collar workers.
Vincent ‘the Chin’ Gigante — his nickname came from the Italian pronunciation of his real name, Vincenzo — was regarded as the most powerful mafioso in the U.S. by the early Nineties. But he later earned another nickname, ‘The Oddfather’, by wandering the streets of Greenwich Village in New York for ten years dressed in pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, muttering incoherently.
But his mental illness was exposed as a fraud after investigators recorded him lucidly planning Mob operations.
Mob chief: Vincent 'The Chin' Gigante
Mafioso: Anthony 'Fat Tony' Salerno
This particular Teamsters branch was notorious for being the most corrupt in the U.S. Indeed, it was even run by a mobster — Tony Provenzano, a Mafia hitman who was later jailed for murder and extortion. (Provenzano’s predecessor disappeared — it is believed the Mob murdered him and put his body through a tree shredder.)
Through the union, Provenzano had been connected to two even more famous crooks — the corrupt Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared presumed murdered in 1975, and President Nixon, whom the FBI believes benefited from a £600,000 secret cash fund set up by racketeers within the Teamsters.
Provenzano and Nixon even played golf together. It has since emerged that the U.S. Justice Department believed Nixon intended to use the Teamsters’ cash as hush money for the burglars who broke into Democrat Party offices in the Watergate Hotel.
The 1988 lawsuit claimed Mr Shevell ‘cultivated’ an 11-year ‘corrupt relationship’ with Provenzano and a clutch of other mobsters.
They would not look good on a McCartney wedding guest list. The notorious Mafiosi alleged to have been involved with Shevell Snr included Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, Matty ‘The Horse’ Ianniello and Stephen Andretta.
The government claimed that Mr Shevell’s ‘aberrant labour practices served as a conspicuously negative example of union corruption within the trucking industry’
Ianniello, who would go on to run the entire Genovese clan after managing its vice operations, was recorded in a wire-tapped conversation suggesting that one of Mr Shevell’s trucking companies, Eastern Freight Ways (which employed Provenzano’s brother, Angelo), was a ‘front’ for the Mob.
‘Yeah, we formed a truck company,’ said Ianniello, referring to Eastern.
The government claimed that Mr Shevell’s ‘aberrant labour practices served as a conspicuously negative example of union corruption within the trucking industry’, and that his company’s racketeering activity with the union ‘tended to exacerbate the extortionate climate of intimidation’.
In the years it was run by Provenzano, drivers and company owners alike were threatened and blackmailed.
Mr Shevell, now 74, later said the lawsuit was settled without any charges of wrongdoing proved against him. However, prosecutors point out that he actually agreed to a deal whereby he was barred for five years from engaging in any union negotiations.
His run-in with the authorities does not appear to have harmed his business excessively in the years that followed. The Shevell Group now owns six trucking companies and employs 5,000 staff. Its business — carrying clothing, nappies, Kleenex tissues and basketballs across the U.S. — is worth more than $400 million a year.
Holiday pair: Sir Paul and Nancy spend New Year's Day on the beach in Mexico
As with Sir Paul — who over the years has had to contend with the early deaths of his mother, his first wife Linda and two fellow Beatles — Nancy has had more than her share of premature bereavements.
The most shattering blow came three years ago when her brother Jon died in the most squalid circumstances.
At 6ft 6in, he had played basketball for his state and professionally in Europe before joining the family company. However, he had a history of drug abuse which saw him spend increasing amounts of time away from his job. It became a compulsion which cost him his life.
On March 3, 2008, the 50-year-old was found dead in his room at the exclusive Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, where he had been staying for two-and-a-half weeks.
The local coroner’s office confirmed to me this week that his death emerged only when members of his family contacted the hotel after becoming alarmed at not hearing from him. Hotel security forced their way into his room and found him lying across the foot of his bed.
Police discovered a vial of cocaine nearby, and a post-mortem report ruled he had died from ‘multi-drug intoxication’. His system contained not only cocaine but five different painkiller and tranquiliser drugs.
Though the couple have now sustained their romance for four years, and last week announced their engagement, there is no doubt the death of Nancy’s brother has cast a long shadow over her life in recent times.
In the same month that Nancy was shattered by the loss of her brother, her lover Paul McCartney was hit by the death of Neil Aspinall — his former band’s road manager and chief confidant, who had been dubbed the ‘fifth Beatle’.
Just as McCartney is said to have bonded with John Lennon over their shared experience of losing their mothers early in life, it seems he was drawn to Shevell (who, like Linda, fought a battle against breast cancer in the mid-1990s) by grief over their respective bereavements.
Friends say McCartney — at the time still in the throes of his divorce from Heather Mills — suggested to Nancy they go on holiday to cheer themselves up.
They flew to the Caribbean island of Antigua, where they rented a £6,000-a-night villa. They behaved like a honeymoon couple, kissing and holding hands.
Though the couple have now sustained their romance for four years, and last week announced their engagement, there is no doubt the death of Nancy’s brother has cast a long shadow over her life in recent times.
While McCartney has admitted experimenting with heroin and cocaine in the past, Nancy is thought to be far too wrapped up in her career ever to have been distracted by drugs. She has said her childhood was defined by her father’s business — the little girl even looked forward to the toy trucks he bought her without fail each holiday.
‘I used to line them up in my room, right next to my Barbies,’ she told a local newspaper.
She and her brother used to accompany their father into work at weekends and play in the truck yards while he checked on the family assets.
‘While other kids would go feed ducks in the park, we would go to our father’s truck terminals … every single weekend,’ she said.
Sir Paul has long been drawn to strong women and there's no doubt his third wife-to-be is going to be more than a match for the former Beatle
Though Myron Shevell could no doubt have afforded to pay for a private school and then an Ivy League university, Nancy was sent to the local high school before going on to Arizona State, where she was the only woman to major in transportation.
Although she joined the family business after she graduated, she has recalled how she had to fight for respect in the male-dominated haulage industry.
She claims a group of executives tested her every day during her first year at the family company. Once, she returned fire, questioning why a vice-president was taking someone on during a hiring freeze.
‘He started screaming and yelling at me and threw me out of his office,’ she said.
Then, displaying a steeliness which may have proved as much of a draw for Sir Paul as her beauty, she added: ‘I went right back in and told him I wouldn’t leave the office until I got an answer. I don’t know where he is right now, but I know where I am.’
There is no doubt Paul McCartney has long been drawn to strong women, and there’s no doubt his third wife-to-be — while rich in her own right and a beauty to boot — is going to be more than a match for the former Beatle.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1386907/Paul-McCartney-Murder-Mob-new-Lady-Macca.html#ixzz1MHM13Q4J
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