by Dr031718 » Thu May 01, 2025 5:06 am
Father Of 3-Year-Old Allegedly Assaulted By Mob Associate Jonathan Braun Doesn't Want To Testify
Jonathan Braun, the convicted drug dealer whose prior prison term was commuted by President Trump could dodge another legal bullet for allegedly assaulting a 3-year-old boy and punching his father in the face because the dad now refuses to testify, Gang Land has learned.
The father was expected to be the key government witness against the Gambino associate until he informed prosecutors of his decision to sit out the current federal court prosecution of Braun, who is accused of violating the supervised release of his prison term that was commuted by Trump in January of 2021.
Braun's lawyer informed Brooklyn Federal Judge Kiyo Matsumoto on day two of a court hearing last month that the boy's father had told the government that he would "not testify or comment" when the judge said he was an "important witness" she wanted to hear from.
The father had previously told Nassau County police that Braun punched him "in the face" before shoving him and his young son "to the ground," leaving a "red mark on (the boy's) back and causing substantial pain to his back," according to the arrest complaint.
The allegation that Braun, 41, assaulted the young boy — and was released on $25,000 bail after police arrested him on March 29 — was a major reason why the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office moved to arrest the ex-con a week later and detain him for violating his post-prison supervised release (VOSR) from the sentence that Trump commuted on the last day of his first term as POTUS.
"It was alarming that the victim was a three-year-old child … Braun's behavior was becoming more violent," a law enforcement source told Gang Land last month.
Matsumoto raised the issue before Braun's former live-in nanny took the stand on April 11, and testified about her escape from the defendant’s clutches early one morning in February. She described how he entered her room, groped her and forced her to touch him as she lay on her bed and propositioned her.
The victim escaped by saying she had to relieve herself, locked herself inside her bathroom until Nassau County cops came to her rescue after she texted her husband, Braun's wife and others for help, she testified.
"I would like to hear testimony" from the boy's father, identified during the two days of the hearing only as Shammai, a visitor who was at Braun's home in Lawrence for a Sabbath service on March 29, the judge told assistant U.S. attorneys Rachel Bennek and Tanya Hajjar.
The prosecutors quickly agreed and asked Matsumoto to schedule a follow up session in "three or four weeks" to give them time to arrange for his testimony.
That's when Braun's attorney Kathryn Wozencroft told the judge that according to discovery material prosecutors had turned over to her, the witness had told the government, "Quote, 'I have no comment at this time, I will not testify.'"
She asked Matsumoto to preclude him from testifying since prosecutors didn't call him on the first two days of the hearing, which were not Jewish holidays.
Wozencroft noted that Braun waived a preliminary hearing when prosecutors agreed to conduct a full bail revocation hearing. She stated that her client had already agreed to schedule a second day to accommodate the testimony of the nanny and she objected to any further delay in the hearing.
The attorney argued that it was "unfair and inappropriate" for prosecutors to have "three or four weeks to call additional witnesses" when Braun had waived his specific right to a preliminary hearing "with the understanding that his full hearing" would be concluded that day, April 11.
Matsumoto sided with the government, ruling that Shammai was "an important witness" she wanted to hear from him. She ordered prosecutors to do everything they can to get him in court for the next scheduled session on May 15.
Prosecutors would be able to introduce the arrest complaint that police filed in Mineola Supreme Court at the hearing if they are unable to get the witness, by subpoena or otherwise, to testify. But its impact would be questionable on the issue involving the alleged assault of the boy, based on testimony on day one of the hearing by Braun's butler, Jason Dizon.
Dizon testified that Braun and Shammai had "an altercation" that day when the defendant “tried to grab Shammai" and they both fell to the ground. Dizon said he pulled Braun off his victim and separated the men. Braun later kicked Shammai, but at no time did Braun hit or even touch any of Shammai's four children who were there, he said.
There was no evidence of an assault of the boy in any of the home videos played during the hearing, and Dizon insisted under questioning by both Wozencroft and Bennek that he was in the kitchen-living room area with Shammai until he and his family left the house.
"I didn't see him hit any kid that day," he testified.
At the conclusion of the nanny's testimony, Wozencroft made an impassioned plea for Braun’s release on a $100,000 bond and home detention with electronic monitoring so her client could celebrate "Passover, which is an incredibly important holiday in Jewish tradition" at home and not behind bars.
He would continue to live with his butler, she said, who was in court and supports him, and would continue the mental health therapy and drug testing that he was undergoing at the Metropolitan Detention Center and would not be a danger or risk of flight while the case proceeds.
Prosecutor Hajjar objected, arguing that even the "limited offer of proof" in the two days of the hearing established Braun's "violence (and) erratic conduct," along with a disregard of his supervised release conditions, noting that much of that conduct had occurred "in the defendant's home."
Hajjar stated that the government had evidence that the nanny was offered "money to have her drop this claim" by a close friend or relative of the defendant and there was also a "risk of obstruction in this case" that should be considered.
Wozencroft said there was no evidence that Braun had any knowledge about that and asked the judge not to consider it, stating that under the home incarceration restrictions that she proposed, "it would be very difficult for him to reach out to anyone" and do anything improper.
Even if Braun wasn't behind the payoff to the nanny, Matsumoto said, she was concerned about obstruction and was going to reluctantly deny the motion for bail because "it wasn't just a random person dropping in out of the blue to contact the witness" but "someone who asked the witness, you know, what does it take to make this go away."
Braun, who is charged with seven separate VOSR allegations, including threatening a nurse during a hospital visit, faces up to five years if Matsumoto finds him guilty of the charges stemming from his release from prison in January 2021, when Trump commuted the 10-year sentence he had received for drug trafficking and money laundering.
From 2015 through 2019, while Braun was awaiting sentencing for money laundering and smuggling 100,000 kilos of marijuana into the U.S., he made millions of dollars in the lucrative Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) industry with Gambino mobster Robert Giardina — much of it illegally, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
In 2022, Giardina, Braun's business partner in two MCA companies, threw in the towel and settled his portion of the civil suit that the FTC had filed against the duo and their companies. Giardina owned up to using "unlawful acts and practices" to swindle thousands of customers and paid $2.7 million to settle his FTC lawsuit.
Braun, who was apparently buoyed by the commutation of his prison term by Trump, opted for a trial. He was found guilty in a civil trial of swindling MCA loan customers out of $3.5 million and fined $16.9 million.
He appealed the verdict, as well as trial judge Jed Rakoff's decision to more than double the $7.5 million fine the jury imposed because Braun "gleefully" took part in years of "illegal conduct" with "a complete disregard for how his actions would affect his customers, most of whom were small businesses." Last year Braun withdrew his appeal, with prejudice.
Judge Slams The Door Shut On Stevie Blue's Life Sentence For The 'Smoking Gun' Murder
Bonanno soldier Stephen (Stevie Blue) LoCurto has good reason to be blue.
Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis echoed a U.S Magistrate's ruling that it wasn't bad legal advice that landed LoCurto in prison for life — but his own bad decision to reject a 20-year plea deal for the "smoking gun" murder of a rival gangster.
And then Garaufis really rubbed it in: He took away LoCurto's right to appeal the decision.
In a 24-page ruling last month, the judge upheld every finding in the decision by Magistrate Judge Sanket Bulsara except for one: the sop that gave Stevie Blue the right to appeal the denial of his claim on the grounds that he had "received objectively unreasonable advice of counsel."
Garaufis shot down the defendant's bid to appeal the denial because "without question," LoCurto "was aware that he could receive a life sentence" if convicted of the murder at trial, and had told his trial lawyer before trial that "he never would have pled guilty" to the murder charge in the case.
The senior judge approved Bulsara's ruling to deny Stevie Blue's motion to vacate his trial conviction and the life sentence he received and allow him to retroactively take a 20-year-plea deal that he rejected before his 2006 trial.
Back in 1987, LoCurto, 64, was acquitted in Manhattan Supreme Court of what he and fellow Bonanno family mobsters dubbed the "smoking gun" murder, with Stevie Blue arrested by police minutes after gunning down gangster Joseph Platia on May 9, 1986, at 10th Avenue and 35th street in Manhattan.
Cops recovered a still warm .38 caliber revolver in his pocket.
In 2004, LoCurto was charged with killing Platia as part of a racketeering case based on info from Bonanno turncoats who had joked with Stevie Blue for years about his acquittal in the "smoking gun" murder.
At a full-blown hearing in November of 2023, LoCurto's court-appointed trial lawyer Harry Batchelder testified about a conversation with his client.
"One of the first things he ever said to me was, 'Don’t try to talk me into getting a plea; we are going to trial,” he recounted. And I beat a case in State (court), which was the predicate act for murder here."
In his decision last year, Bulsara wrote that Batchelder testified that he "disagreed" with the opinion of the appeals lawyer Batchelder hired, Laura Oppenheim, that a life sentence for murder as a predicate act could be reversed on appeal. He instead “repeatedly told LoCurto that he would receive a life sentence" if convicted at trial. The maximum penalty had been 20 years in 1986, but was upgraded to life in 1988.
“In fact," Bulsara wrote, "even Oppenheim — whose deficient advice is the basis of his claim — points out that LoCurto was committed and determined to go to trial," noting that "she recounted" as much in a 2010 letter to the defendant that was introduced into evidence at the hearing.
"I never believed your case was triable," she stated. "You were so insistent that you 'could beat the homicide' because you had been acquitted in state court, you simply would not listen to anything I said about the strength of the government's case. You were, I remember, particularly dismissive when I tried to explain the difference between the federal prosecution and the state prosecution — especially the fact that the state prosecutor was barred from mentioning or presenting evidence of Organized Crime during the state case."
Garaufis wrote that even "at the evidentiary hearing" some 17 years after his trial conviction, "LoCurto was unwilling to admit that he agreed to conduct the activities of the Bonanno crime family when he murdered Platia."
That demonstrated, the judge wrote, "that he had no intention of conceding that he murdered Platia as part of any criminal enterprise."
The judge agreed with Bulsara that "it is plain that [LoCurto] never would have pled guilty to the charged racketeering offense." But Garaufis "respectfully" disagreed with Bulsara's decision to give Stevie Blue the right to appeal his ruling: LoCurto "failed to make a substantial showing that he was denied a constitutional right" by the denial of his motion, the judge wrote.
LoCurto's 15-year-old lawsuit seeking permission to accept a 20-year-plea deal to the "smoking gun" murder is not dead yet, says Seton Hall law professor Bernard Freamon. His argument has been throughout that if his client had not received lousy legal advice from Oppenheim, Stevie Blue would have taken the plea offer, pleaded guilty and walked out of prison years ago.
"I'm preparing a petition to obtain a Certificate of Appealability from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals," Freamon said.
Trio of New York Area Gangsters Released From Federal Prisons Last Weekend
After 36 years behind bars for a mob rubout in a prominent Manhattan restaurant, Louis (Bobby) Manna finally returned home Friday — as Gang Land had forecasted. But he wasn't the only Genovese mobster to enjoy a late-in-life taste of freedom: Anthony (Rom) Romanello, eight years younger at 87, was released after 14 months in stir for his one-punch extortion of a prominent Manhattan restaurant owner.
That same day, the Bureau of Prisons disclosed that Colombo gangster Vito Guzzo, the once-feared leader of a violent Queens-based crew of young wannabe wiseguys affiliated with three crime families, was placed in a New York City halfway house, as Gang Land reported he would back in March. Guzzo, 60, has spent 28 years behind bars for five 1990s murders.
The BOP released Guzzo from its facility in Danbury one decade before the prison term of 38 years that he accepted when he pleaded guilty, had run out. He earned much of that so-called "good time credit" thanks to provisions of the First Step Act of 2018 (FSA) that rewarded him for completing a variety of BOP Evidence-Based Recidivism Reduction (EBRR) programs.
“It's great to see the courts and the BOP divert from the prior policy of warehousing people until they die," defense attorney Joseph Corozzo volunteered. "I don't know why the judges are doing it, or why the BOP is doing it. But it's a much more enlightened policy; that rehabilitation works and that defendants can earn enough time to win a release from prison."
In recent columns, Gang Land detailed Manna's release, which was recommended by the warden at his prison hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, and finally ordered by a judge, as well as the release of Guzzo, which was set in motion solely by the BOP's use of provisions under the FSA.
Despite the good news for the senior citizen gangsters, the ins and outs of the BOP's protocol for how it releases its inmates remains complicated and confusing. That's according to BOP spokespersons, as well as a look at the unexpected release of Romanello after 14 months of a two-year sentence, and the prison terms that Rom and codefendant Joseph Celso each received for their convictions, and where they are now.
Rom was found guilty of extortion and extortion conspiracy involving Bruno Selimaj, the owner of the Club A Steakhouse and the restaurateur he slugged in the face, for which he was sentenced to 24 months behind bars.
Celso, 52, was acquitted of extortion and obstruction of justice, but convicted of extortion conspiracy and sentenced to 33 months — essentially for his interactions he had with Selimaj's brother Nino, the owner of Nino's Ristorante on the night that Romanello clocked Bruno.
Romanello is no longer in BOP custody; he was released from a prison hospital in Ayer Massachusetts, on April 25. Celso was transferred from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to a halfway house on April 15, ten days before Rom went home, and Celso's official release date from custody is on February 14 of 2026.
BOP spokespersons, for privacy, security and other reasons, declined to detail how the duo's prison stays and releases were worked out.
“Generally speaking, release dates are calculated with several factors in mind," according to a prepared statement by a spokesman, who noted "every incarcerated individual earns Good Conduct Time (GCT)" of up to 54 days "for each year of the sentence imposed by the court."
In addition to the EBRR programs that Guzzo completed, inmates can also earn GCT by participating in "Productive Activities (PAs)" that the BOP determines are "recommended by the inmate's individualized risk and needs assessment," the spokesman said.
The spokesmen declined to state whether Guzzo, believed to be in the same halfway house as Celso, will be there until November of 2028, which is when his BOP custody is due to end, according to the BOP database.
Technically, under the FSA, "inmates can spend more than one year in community confinement before their release," but several attorneys told Gang Land they expect Guzzo will spend less than a year at the halfway house where he is currently housed.
Following his release from custody, Guzzo will be on strict post prison supervised release for nine years, according to the docket sheet of his case.
[size=150]Father Of 3-Year-Old Allegedly Assaulted By Mob Associate Jonathan Braun Doesn't Want To Testify[/size]
Jonathan Braun, the convicted drug dealer whose prior prison term was commuted by President Trump could dodge another legal bullet for allegedly assaulting a 3-year-old boy and punching his father in the face because the dad now refuses to testify, Gang Land has learned.
The father was expected to be the key government witness against the Gambino associate until he informed prosecutors of his decision to sit out the current federal court prosecution of Braun, who is accused of violating the supervised release of his prison term that was commuted by Trump in January of 2021.
Braun's lawyer informed Brooklyn Federal Judge Kiyo Matsumoto on day two of a court hearing last month that the boy's father had told the government that he would "not testify or comment" when the judge said he was an "important witness" she wanted to hear from.
The father had previously told Nassau County police that Braun punched him "in the face" before shoving him and his young son "to the ground," leaving a "red mark on (the boy's) back and causing substantial pain to his back," according to the arrest complaint.
The allegation that Braun, 41, assaulted the young boy — and was released on $25,000 bail after police arrested him on March 29 — was a major reason why the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office moved to arrest the ex-con a week later and detain him for violating his post-prison supervised release (VOSR) from the sentence that Trump commuted on the last day of his first term as POTUS.
"It was alarming that the victim was a three-year-old child … Braun's behavior was becoming more violent," a law enforcement source told Gang Land last month.
Matsumoto raised the issue before Braun's former live-in nanny took the stand on April 11, and testified about her escape from the defendant’s clutches early one morning in February. She described how he entered her room, groped her and forced her to touch him as she lay on her bed and propositioned her.
The victim escaped by saying she had to relieve herself, locked herself inside her bathroom until Nassau County cops came to her rescue after she texted her husband, Braun's wife and others for help, she testified.
"I would like to hear testimony" from the boy's father, identified during the two days of the hearing only as Shammai, a visitor who was at Braun's home in Lawrence for a Sabbath service on March 29, the judge told assistant U.S. attorneys Rachel Bennek and Tanya Hajjar.
The prosecutors quickly agreed and asked Matsumoto to schedule a follow up session in "three or four weeks" to give them time to arrange for his testimony.
That's when Braun's attorney Kathryn Wozencroft told the judge that according to discovery material prosecutors had turned over to her, the witness had told the government, "Quote, 'I have no comment at this time, I will not testify.'"
She asked Matsumoto to preclude him from testifying since prosecutors didn't call him on the first two days of the hearing, which were not Jewish holidays.
Wozencroft noted that Braun waived a preliminary hearing when prosecutors agreed to conduct a full bail revocation hearing. She stated that her client had already agreed to schedule a second day to accommodate the testimony of the nanny and she objected to any further delay in the hearing.
The attorney argued that it was "unfair and inappropriate" for prosecutors to have "three or four weeks to call additional witnesses" when Braun had waived his specific right to a preliminary hearing "with the understanding that his full hearing" would be concluded that day, April 11.
Matsumoto sided with the government, ruling that Shammai was "an important witness" she wanted to hear from him. She ordered prosecutors to do everything they can to get him in court for the next scheduled session on May 15.
Prosecutors would be able to introduce the arrest complaint that police filed in Mineola Supreme Court at the hearing if they are unable to get the witness, by subpoena or otherwise, to testify. But its impact would be questionable on the issue involving the alleged assault of the boy, based on testimony on day one of the hearing by Braun's butler, Jason Dizon.
Dizon testified that Braun and Shammai had "an altercation" that day when the defendant “tried to grab Shammai" and they both fell to the ground. Dizon said he pulled Braun off his victim and separated the men. Braun later kicked Shammai, but at no time did Braun hit or even touch any of Shammai's four children who were there, he said.
There was no evidence of an assault of the boy in any of the home videos played during the hearing, and Dizon insisted under questioning by both Wozencroft and Bennek that he was in the kitchen-living room area with Shammai until he and his family left the house.
"I didn't see him hit any kid that day," he testified.
At the conclusion of the nanny's testimony, Wozencroft made an impassioned plea for Braun’s release on a $100,000 bond and home detention with electronic monitoring so her client could celebrate "Passover, which is an incredibly important holiday in Jewish tradition" at home and not behind bars.
He would continue to live with his butler, she said, who was in court and supports him, and would continue the mental health therapy and drug testing that he was undergoing at the Metropolitan Detention Center and would not be a danger or risk of flight while the case proceeds.
Prosecutor Hajjar objected, arguing that even the "limited offer of proof" in the two days of the hearing established Braun's "violence (and) erratic conduct," along with a disregard of his supervised release conditions, noting that much of that conduct had occurred "in the defendant's home."
Hajjar stated that the government had evidence that the nanny was offered "money to have her drop this claim" by a close friend or relative of the defendant and there was also a "risk of obstruction in this case" that should be considered.
Wozencroft said there was no evidence that Braun had any knowledge about that and asked the judge not to consider it, stating that under the home incarceration restrictions that she proposed, "it would be very difficult for him to reach out to anyone" and do anything improper.
Even if Braun wasn't behind the payoff to the nanny, Matsumoto said, she was concerned about obstruction and was going to reluctantly deny the motion for bail because "it wasn't just a random person dropping in out of the blue to contact the witness" but "someone who asked the witness, you know, what does it take to make this go away."
Braun, who is charged with seven separate VOSR allegations, including threatening a nurse during a hospital visit, faces up to five years if Matsumoto finds him guilty of the charges stemming from his release from prison in January 2021, when Trump commuted the 10-year sentence he had received for drug trafficking and money laundering.
From 2015 through 2019, while Braun was awaiting sentencing for money laundering and smuggling 100,000 kilos of marijuana into the U.S., he made millions of dollars in the lucrative Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) industry with Gambino mobster Robert Giardina — much of it illegally, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
In 2022, Giardina, Braun's business partner in two MCA companies, threw in the towel and settled his portion of the civil suit that the FTC had filed against the duo and their companies. Giardina owned up to using "unlawful acts and practices" to swindle thousands of customers and paid $2.7 million to settle his FTC lawsuit.
Braun, who was apparently buoyed by the commutation of his prison term by Trump, opted for a trial. He was found guilty in a civil trial of swindling MCA loan customers out of $3.5 million and fined $16.9 million.
He appealed the verdict, as well as trial judge Jed Rakoff's decision to more than double the $7.5 million fine the jury imposed because Braun "gleefully" took part in years of "illegal conduct" with "a complete disregard for how his actions would affect his customers, most of whom were small businesses." Last year Braun withdrew his appeal, with prejudice.
[size=150]Judge Slams The Door Shut On Stevie Blue's Life Sentence For The 'Smoking Gun' Murder [/size]
Bonanno soldier Stephen (Stevie Blue) LoCurto has good reason to be blue.
Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis echoed a U.S Magistrate's ruling that it wasn't bad legal advice that landed LoCurto in prison for life — but his own bad decision to reject a 20-year plea deal for the "smoking gun" murder of a rival gangster.
And then Garaufis really rubbed it in: He took away LoCurto's right to appeal the decision.
In a 24-page ruling last month, the judge upheld every finding in the decision by Magistrate Judge Sanket Bulsara except for one: the sop that gave Stevie Blue the right to appeal the denial of his claim on the grounds that he had "received objectively unreasonable advice of counsel."
Garaufis shot down the defendant's bid to appeal the denial because "without question," LoCurto "was aware that he could receive a life sentence" if convicted of the murder at trial, and had told his trial lawyer before trial that "he never would have pled guilty" to the murder charge in the case.
The senior judge approved Bulsara's ruling to deny Stevie Blue's motion to vacate his trial conviction and the life sentence he received and allow him to retroactively take a 20-year-plea deal that he rejected before his 2006 trial.
Back in 1987, LoCurto, 64, was acquitted in Manhattan Supreme Court of what he and fellow Bonanno family mobsters dubbed the "smoking gun" murder, with Stevie Blue arrested by police minutes after gunning down gangster Joseph Platia on May 9, 1986, at 10th Avenue and 35th street in Manhattan.
Cops recovered a still warm .38 caliber revolver in his pocket.
In 2004, LoCurto was charged with killing Platia as part of a racketeering case based on info from Bonanno turncoats who had joked with Stevie Blue for years about his acquittal in the "smoking gun" murder.
At a full-blown hearing in November of 2023, LoCurto's court-appointed trial lawyer Harry Batchelder testified about a conversation with his client.
"One of the first things he ever said to me was, 'Don’t try to talk me into getting a plea; we are going to trial,” he recounted. And I beat a case in State (court), which was the predicate act for murder here."
In his decision last year, Bulsara wrote that Batchelder testified that he "disagreed" with the opinion of the appeals lawyer Batchelder hired, Laura Oppenheim, that a life sentence for murder as a predicate act could be reversed on appeal. He instead “repeatedly told LoCurto that he would receive a life sentence" if convicted at trial. The maximum penalty had been 20 years in 1986, but was upgraded to life in 1988.
“In fact," Bulsara wrote, "even Oppenheim — whose deficient advice is the basis of his claim — points out that LoCurto was committed and determined to go to trial," noting that "she recounted" as much in a 2010 letter to the defendant that was introduced into evidence at the hearing.
"I never believed your case was triable," she stated. "You were so insistent that you 'could beat the homicide' because you had been acquitted in state court, you simply would not listen to anything I said about the strength of the government's case. You were, I remember, particularly dismissive when I tried to explain the difference between the federal prosecution and the state prosecution — especially the fact that the state prosecutor was barred from mentioning or presenting evidence of Organized Crime during the state case."
Garaufis wrote that even "at the evidentiary hearing" some 17 years after his trial conviction, "LoCurto was unwilling to admit that he agreed to conduct the activities of the Bonanno crime family when he murdered Platia."
That demonstrated, the judge wrote, "that he had no intention of conceding that he murdered Platia as part of any criminal enterprise."
The judge agreed with Bulsara that "it is plain that [LoCurto] never would have pled guilty to the charged racketeering offense." But Garaufis "respectfully" disagreed with Bulsara's decision to give Stevie Blue the right to appeal his ruling: LoCurto "failed to make a substantial showing that he was denied a constitutional right" by the denial of his motion, the judge wrote.
LoCurto's 15-year-old lawsuit seeking permission to accept a 20-year-plea deal to the "smoking gun" murder is not dead yet, says Seton Hall law professor Bernard Freamon. His argument has been throughout that if his client had not received lousy legal advice from Oppenheim, Stevie Blue would have taken the plea offer, pleaded guilty and walked out of prison years ago.
"I'm preparing a petition to obtain a Certificate of Appealability from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals," Freamon said.
[size=150]Trio of New York Area Gangsters Released From Federal Prisons Last Weekend [/size]
After 36 years behind bars for a mob rubout in a prominent Manhattan restaurant, Louis (Bobby) Manna finally returned home Friday — as Gang Land had forecasted. But he wasn't the only Genovese mobster to enjoy a late-in-life taste of freedom: Anthony (Rom) Romanello, eight years younger at 87, was released after 14 months in stir for his one-punch extortion of a prominent Manhattan restaurant owner.
That same day, the Bureau of Prisons disclosed that Colombo gangster Vito Guzzo, the once-feared leader of a violent Queens-based crew of young wannabe wiseguys affiliated with three crime families, was placed in a New York City halfway house, as Gang Land reported he would back in March. Guzzo, 60, has spent 28 years behind bars for five 1990s murders.
The BOP released Guzzo from its facility in Danbury one decade before the prison term of 38 years that he accepted when he pleaded guilty, had run out. He earned much of that so-called "good time credit" thanks to provisions of the First Step Act of 2018 (FSA) that rewarded him for completing a variety of BOP Evidence-Based Recidivism Reduction (EBRR) programs.
“It's great to see the courts and the BOP divert from the prior policy of warehousing people until they die," defense attorney Joseph Corozzo volunteered. "I don't know why the judges are doing it, or why the BOP is doing it. But it's a much more enlightened policy; that rehabilitation works and that defendants can earn enough time to win a release from prison."
In recent columns, Gang Land detailed Manna's release, which was recommended by the warden at his prison hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, and finally ordered by a judge, as well as the release of Guzzo, which was set in motion solely by the BOP's use of provisions under the FSA.
Despite the good news for the senior citizen gangsters, the ins and outs of the BOP's protocol for how it releases its inmates remains complicated and confusing. That's according to BOP spokespersons, as well as a look at the unexpected release of Romanello after 14 months of a two-year sentence, and the prison terms that Rom and codefendant Joseph Celso each received for their convictions, and where they are now.
Rom was found guilty of extortion and extortion conspiracy involving Bruno Selimaj, the owner of the Club A Steakhouse and the restaurateur he slugged in the face, for which he was sentenced to 24 months behind bars.
Celso, 52, was acquitted of extortion and obstruction of justice, but convicted of extortion conspiracy and sentenced to 33 months — essentially for his interactions he had with Selimaj's brother Nino, the owner of Nino's Ristorante on the night that Romanello clocked Bruno.
Romanello is no longer in BOP custody; he was released from a prison hospital in Ayer Massachusetts, on April 25. Celso was transferred from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to a halfway house on April 15, ten days before Rom went home, and Celso's official release date from custody is on February 14 of 2026.
BOP spokespersons, for privacy, security and other reasons, declined to detail how the duo's prison stays and releases were worked out.
“Generally speaking, release dates are calculated with several factors in mind," according to a prepared statement by a spokesman, who noted "every incarcerated individual earns Good Conduct Time (GCT)" of up to 54 days "for each year of the sentence imposed by the court."
In addition to the EBRR programs that Guzzo completed, inmates can also earn GCT by participating in "Productive Activities (PAs)" that the BOP determines are "recommended by the inmate's individualized risk and needs assessment," the spokesman said.
The spokesmen declined to state whether Guzzo, believed to be in the same halfway house as Celso, will be there until November of 2028, which is when his BOP custody is due to end, according to the BOP database.
Technically, under the FSA, "inmates can spend more than one year in community confinement before their release," but several attorneys told Gang Land they expect Guzzo will spend less than a year at the halfway house where he is currently housed.
Following his release from custody, Guzzo will be on strict post prison supervised release for nine years, according to the docket sheet of his case.