Long Island has always had deep, real-life Mafia ties by way of operations conducted by the likes of the Lucchese, Gambino and Bonanno crime families. For filmmakers Chuck and Polish-born spouse Karolina Morrongiello, it’s something they may very well build on with Extortion Thugs, the current cinematic project the duo recently finished shooting.
Inspired by a wide raft of influences from ’50s noir to more recent organized crime portrayals ranging from The Godfather and Goodfellas to The Sopranos, Extortion Thugs evolved out of five fictional crime families Chuck Morrongiello came up with while spending six months writing the screenplay starting back in August 2024.
“I started writing it and it was supposed to be about a bunch of Bowery boys who were modern-day thugs picking on people for money,” Morrongiello explained. “Mean Streets kind of inspired me. I found myself going down that road and saw myself pulling myself back from it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a Mafia film, but I started thinking how this could be a mob film. I kept getting pulled back to it and said [screw it], let’s go Cosa Nostra.”
Extortion Thugs was shot over the span of 28 days entirely on Long Island using a wide range of locations sprinkled throughout Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties. Both Morrongiellos shared executive producer and directing duties with Chuck scoring the music and also playing Don Luigi Bellecci, the Chairman and family head of the South Side District. While Morrongiello declined to share the film’s budget, it was a true grassroots effort utilizing 32-plus locations, a cast of 90-plus actors and hundreds of extras. It made for a quintessential indie feature experience.
“Everybody said they absolutely wanted to be part of it and did it for nothing, so it looks like a million-dollar background for free,” the Bethpage native said. “Everybody came on board to do this film with us. All the small business owners and all these places.”
For this story about family, betrayal, loyalty and the ugly underbelly of organized crime, this production shot at a broad swath of locations. Sharp-eyed viewers will recognize Huntington’s Carousel Nightclub, Syosset’s Franina Italian Restaurant, Francesco’s Bakery in Hicksville, A&S Pork Store in Massapequa, Bethpage Wine & Liquors, Fabrizio Funeral Chapels in West Babylon and Russo’s on the Bay in Howard Beach, Queens. Other less recognizable locales included Patchogue’s Underworld Studios, Pine Aire Truck Services in Bay Shore, and Michael Gentile car shop in Deer Park.
Morrongielli, who counts Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese as filmmaking influences, was a musician who cut his teeth playing on Long Island’s thriving live music scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s (“MTV came on the scene and started changing the whole music industry. A lot of club owners started ripping out their stages and putting in dance floors and I was out of a job.”) A move down to Tampa, Fl. in 1987 to take part in Northwest Mutual’s training class led to a lucrative career pivot to selling insurance for the next three decades-plus.
He and his bride eventually indulged in a mutual love of film. Their first project was 2018’s Amityville: Mt. Misery Rd., all shot on an iPhone and inspired by the strange goings-ons at a nearby Huntington byway of the same name. Follow-up projects included 2023’s The American Ripper and 2025’s Bad Bunny, with the latter being distributed by the same company that released the viral horror hit Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.
“Bad Bunny is a horror film we did up in the Poconos,” Morrongiello said. “ITM Films is our distribution company and they’re promoting the crap out of it. Instead of calling my film Mount Misery Road, they renamed it Amityville Mount Misery Road. Instead of calling it Bugs the Bunny Killer, which is what I wanted to call it, they called it Bad Bunny because of the rapper.”
With the earliest release date set for late summer, the Extortion Thugs world is divided amongst the South Side, East Side, Upper West Side and North Side Districts. A Grand Senate of Bosses oversees these territories while characters with names like Fat Man Alonzo, Crazy Man Sharpo and Luciano “Red Hands” Cattaneo populate the cinematic landscape. The crux of the plot centers on Morrongiello’s Don Luigi Bellecci being a ruthless sociopath caught up in a power struggle while trying to walk the line between being a devoted family man (with a drug-addicted stripper/mistress played by Karolina) and an emotionless crime lord fueled by greed and a hair-trigger temper resulting in a number of violent and disturbing scenes.
Morrongiello’s vision strives for a certain authenticity that finds his characters not only speaking Italian, but the specific Sicilian dialect, while drawing inspiration from both his directorial heroes and real-life mobsters.
“The movie is about a modern-day John Gotti/Lucky Luciano/Albert Anastasia,” Morrongiello. “He is more powerful than those guys, which is me. I made the character so he was pushing hundreds of millions of dollars of heroin, cocaine, racketeering, extortion, loan sharking, prostitution and gambling. I didn’t want to do a John Gotti movie because it was already done by Armand Assante and John Travolta, but I thought I’d take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and then make this fictional story.”
