Gangland News - 6/3/21

[mafiastudent]

'It Was Not An Earthquake. It Was A Sign From My Dead Grandparents To Turn Myself In To The FBI.'

Gang Land Exclusive!

John PennisiLuchese turncoat mobster John Pennisi says he got an earth-shaking message from the great beyond via his deceased grandparents that convinced him to become a government cooperator.

The paranormal message came to him in his Long Island home just as he was praying before a photo of his late grandparents and seeking their advice about whether he should turn informant, he said in a recent podcast. Just at that moment, Pennisi says he heard a sudden loud rattling of dishes and glasses. "Everything was shaking in the house," Pennisi told podcaster Gary Jenkins.

That was the sign, Pennisi said, that convinced him to turn himself into the FBI in October 2018.

In the three trials where he has testified since becoming a government witness, Pennisi has never mentioned his poltergeist-style encounter. In his sworn testimony, Pennisi has said he flipped after Luchese family leaders wrongly tagged him as a "rat."

In the podcast, Pennisi also offered dramatic new details on attempts on his life that he believes had been ordered by his former Luchese allies. Shortly before receiving the supernatural message from the Other Side, he was chased by "five or six Bloods" at a Manhattan jobsite. Pennisi said the hoodlums were laying in wait to kill him for the Lucheses.

"I couldn't believe the level of disrespect they had stooped to," Pennisi told Jenkins. He said the Luchese clan "had started using other ethnic groups. They began using the Bloods."On another occasion, he said, he had chased off another group of Bloods with "a pistol in a knapsack."

Those encounters he said, underscored his uneasiness due to mixed messages he was getting from the family's acting boss, Michael (Big Mike) DeSantis.

Pennisi, who had recently moved, said, "I started seeing people laying around at the train stations in the new town that I lived in."

He said that when a cousin suggested he go to the FBI, he rejected that notion. But his son suggested they "write down the pros and cons" of the options he faced. "As a last resort," said Pennisi, they wrote down the FBI. "That was the other option. It was the first time that I even thought of the government or the FBI. We had to put that down as a last resort."

Pennisi said his son, who "lost 17 years without his father" during the years Pennisi was in prison for killing a neighborhood rival, "was a nervous wreck." Pennisi said his son "knew I was either going to go to jail for the rest of my life, get killed or I'm going to be in some type of a war with these guys and I'm on the losing end. I'm one person. And he told me, 'I think that you should go tomorrow,' and it was a Thursday. And I said, 'All right.' So he left."

Pennisi said he felt "sick to my stomach" from Friday to Sunday and "couldn't do it." But on Monday morning he woke up and prayed to his grandparents who "had passed away" for guidance.

"I didn't live by a train station," Pennisi continued. "You had to walk (there.) There was no planes flying around. It wasn't an earthquake. Gary, I swear to you, I had wine glasses and different glasses and dishes in the house. Everything was shaking in the house," he said in a high pitched voice, imitating the sound of glasses clicking, "bing bing bing bing bing bing."

"I even called my mother up and I says, 'I want you to listen to something.' This went on for hours. She says, 'What is that?' I says, 'It's the glasses. I prayed to Grandma and Grandpa. It's the glasses and the dishes and the house is shaking.' Gary, I can't even explain it. And THAT was my sign to go."

Two attorneys who represent defendants against whom Pennisi testified said they should have been able to ask him about his strange encounters with the great beyond in front of a jury.

"It is simply inexcusable that the defense was never told about Pennisi's claim that he had the supernatural ability to fend off multiple attempts on his life by the Bloods, or the paranormal events that he claimed triggered his cooperation," said Anthony DiPietro, the attorney for convicted underboss Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea.

"Had these materials, and many other things now revealed by Pennisi, been properly disclosed by the government, no grand jury or trial jury would ever credit his tales," said DiPietro. "His capitalizing on his cooperation calls into question his prior testimony and his motives to fabricate now," DiPietro said, adding that it is unlikely the mob defector will be a credible witness in the future, including at a "retrial for Crea" that the lawyer says he expects to win.

Lawyer Gerald McMahon, who saw Pennisi testify against his client, Eugene (Boobsie) Castelle, had his own take on the new explanation by the government informant. On the witness stand, Pennisi testified that John (Big John) Castellucci made up the claim Pennisi was a "rat" to protect Boobsie from being ostracized or worse for violating mob protocol and sleeping with Castelle's girlfriend.

"With the recent spate of videos of UFO sightings that the Air Force and government are saying are the real thing," said McMahon, "there's a bit of poetry and symmetry in his account. I swear to God," said the lawyer, "that in one of those videos I thought I saw Pennisi with a helmet on. This confirms that it was in fact Pennisi traveling from a distant galaxy far far away."

On the podcast, Pennisi offered one more revelation about his sojourn to join Team USA that day: He "went to the wrong building in Manhattan," he told Jenkins, and had to Google the FBI to find where to go.

"It was crazy," Pennisi continued. "I went, and actually it was like a terrorist task force" group that he spoke to at first. "Of course, they contacted the right people," he continued. "That's how it took place in all honesty. People believe it. They don't believe it, I don't care, I'm telling you, that's the way it happened."

"I believe it," said Jenkins. "It's got the ring of truth to it, I'll tell you right now."

Prosecutors Drop Sex Abuse Case Against Octagenarian Survivor Of Failed Mob Rubout

Anthony Coglitore, who survived a 1978 assasination attempt by Bonanno wiseguys who wrongly suspected him of blowing up a family mobster, came up very lucky again last month. On purely technical grounds, the 87-year-old survivor beat the rap for allegedly sexually abusing two young children, including an eight year old girl. Both alleged victims were relatives.

Coglitore wrote a book about how he survived the shooting in the driveway of his Staten Island home on December 28, 1978. But he's unlikely to be telling any tales about how he walked away from charges on his most recent brush with the law. According to the charges, Cogitore began sexually abusing the eight-year-old in her Long Island home on September 1, 2001. The abuse continued until the day before she turned 17 in 2009.

Coglitore was alleged to have also sexually abused the girl's younger brother in December of 2006 and January of 2007, when the boy was 13 years old. The charges involing the siblings were dropped due to the statute of limitations, which had run out on the two felony sexual abuse charges, as well as four misdemeanor allegations against him.

Following his arrest by Nassau police in September of 2020 on a complaint by the now-28-year-old woman, Coglitore was subequently indicted on felony sex abuse charges involving her from 2001 until 2009. He was also charged with violating her brother, who is now 26, from 2005 until 2011, when he was 16. Each felony charge carried a maximum penalty of seven years.

Coglitore was charged under a 2019 law which states that the five year statute of limitations (SOL) does not begin to run in sexual abuse cases of minor children until the victim "child has reached the age of 23 or the offense is reported" to police or another law enforcement agency, "whichever occurs earlier."

A Nassau County grand jury indicted Coglitore for sexually abusing both victims under that law, since the girl turned 23 in 2015, and the boy reached that age in 2017, placing crimes against them within the five year SOL. But Coglitore's lawyer argued that the ex post facto clause of the Constitution barred the prosecution because the SOL clock under the prior law began to run when each alleged victim was 18, not 23.

"This case must be dismissed," attorney Robert Caliendo wrote, because by using "New York's Child Victims Act, of 2019" the Nassau County District Attorney's Office improperly charged his client with alleged crimes "that expired in 2015 for Jane Doe and 2017 for John Doe, five years after their respective 18th birthdays."

When Coglitore's case was called on May 21, assistant district attorney Sean Jamie conceded that the defense claim was valid and asked the judge to dismiss the case.

"I'm pleased the DA agreed to dismiss the indictment, which was not legally brought," said Caliendo. "At my client's age, any prison time would have likely been a death sentence. It's an important reminder that just because an arrest is made, it doesn't mean a conviction will follow."

In 2018, Coglitore penned Eleven Shots, a little noticed book about his life and the attempted mob rubout. His only connection to the mob, he wrote, was having the misfortune to lose $4000 in a Ponzi scheme run by mobster neighbor, Frank Coppa, who wrongly believed that Coglitore had detonated a bomb in Coppa's car a few months earlier.

Big Joe Seeks Compassion From Judge Who Hit Him Hard

n ailing 85 year old Luchese family wiseguy has asked a federal judge to use the First Step Act of 2018 to punish prison officials for summarily rejecting her order to hospitalize him nine months ago and permit him to complete the one and a half to two years of his 52 month sentence that he is slated to spend behind bars at home with his wife of 65 years.

In the filing with White Plains Federal Judge Cathy Seibel, his lawyer argues that the 16 months of hard time that Joseph (Big Joe) DiNapoli has spent behind bars since February of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to ravage the country, qualifies as extraordinary and compelling reasons to grant him a compassionate release.

Attorney Gerard Marrone told Siebel that DiNapoli, who will be 86 next month, has endured a "harder time due to the stress and lockdown due to the pandemic" than the judge had envisioned when she sentenced him in December of 2019, months before the coronavirus arrived.

After his incarceration at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Big Joe was hospitalized due to a dangerous spike in his glucose level. Hospital doctors also had to treat him for heart issues and pneumonia. Despite those ailments, Bureau of Prisons officials waited more than three months after Seibel told them to hospitalize DiNapoli to transfer him to a regular facility, not a prison hospital, Marrone wrote.

"In their infinite wisdom," Marrone wrote, prison officials transferred the "85-year-old sick man" to a medium security facility at the prison complex in Butner North Carolina instead of the prison hospital there where Big Joe would have better care, and have a much better chance to survive, if he were to contract the COVID-19 virus.

DiNapoli's official release date is in October of 2023, but Marrone noted that because of his age and well-established ailments Big Joe would likely be released or placed in a halfway house a year earlier and asked Seibel to release him now.

If released, Marrone wrote, Big Joe will reside with his wife, Loretta, and their daughter in their Bronx home. Citing his client's perfect compliance with his bail restrictions during the more than two years before he surrendered to begin his sentence, the lawyer wrote that DiNapoli "will comply with all conditions imposed upon him."

"The reality is that DiNapoli will be released within two years," wrote Marrone. "However, without court intervention and a change in his sentence, DiNapoli may very well die in jail."

In imposing a 52 sentence — six months more than the recommended maximum in his plea deal for racketeering and loansharking — Seibel acknowledged that Big Joe could die behind bars but stated that she hoped he didn't.

"In keeping with the spirit of the First Step Act," the lawyer asked Seibel "to grant DiNapoli a compassionate release and allow him to return home to complete his sentence and continue with his heart treatments and recovery under" whatever conditions that the Court and the Probation Officials "deem appropriate and safe."

[Chopper]

Thanks for posting

[joeycigars]

I was laughing through the whole read...Then I feel out of my chair

I had to check see if it was Aprils fools or a fake Gangland re- post ...Nope its real,


"It is simply inexcusable that the defense was never told about Pennisi's claim that he had the supernatural ability to fend off multiple attempts on his life by the Bloods, or the paranormal events that he claimed triggered his cooperation," said Anthony DiPietro, the attorney for convicted underboss Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea.


"Everything was shaking in the house," Pennisi told podcaster Gary Jenkins.

That was the sign, Pennisi said, that convinced him to turn himself into the FBI in October 2018.


"With the recent spate of videos of UFO sightings that the Air Force and government are saying are the real thing," said McMahon, "there's a bit of poetry and symmetry in his account. I swear to God," said the lawyer, "that in one of those videos I thought I saw Pennisi with a helmet on. This confirms that it was in fact Pennisi traveling from a distant galaxy far far away."

[eboli]

Satanic black magic. Sick shit!

[AntComello]

I’m starting to think Pennisi is not all there

[JohnnyS]

Thanks for posting.

Jerry phoned it in this week.

[JeremyTheJew]

Lol I know mafia student is gonna hate this....

But doesn't this show a little credibility for the "repenting" that rats like him and al.darco that don't have charges but still flipped...shows that maybe they genuinely didn't want the life anymore.

[Mustangsally]

Satanic black magic. Sick shit!

FUCKING QUEERS!

[Dapper_Don]

last two GL's leading with old stories about Pennisi that he brought up numerous times in many different podcasts ages ago..sounds to me like Jerry is still a bit salty about what transpired with him and JP and his lackluster stories shows his well of"sources" is running a bit dry

[Southshore88]

Thanks for posting MS

[Cheech]

too bad Jerry didnt include an update on Locascio.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for posting MS.

[Amershire_Ed]

Thanks for posting.

[Dapper_Don]

too bad Jerry didnt include an update on Locascio.

[Tonyd621]

His blog is turning into satire... whether its about Pennisi or the actual stories he expects people to pay for, weekly.