Gangland:12/31/15

[Dellacroce]

December 31, 2015 This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci

2015 Year-In-Review: More Mob Violence Behind Bars Than On The Streets

Thirty years after the spectacular December 16, 1985 assassination of Mafia Boss Paul (Big Paul) Castellano and his top aide in front of a midtown Manhattan steak house amidst the Christmas shopping season, there was more mob violence behind bars in 2015 than there was on the streets of all five boroughs of the Big Apple.

The past year saw many intriguing Gang Land happenings — with the stunning acquittal of Bonanno capo Vincent Asaro of all charges linked to the $6 million Lufthansa Airlines robbery leading the way. But there were no mob hits or violence of note by the once notorious Five Families and their New Jersey brethren, the DeCavalcante clan. As it turns out, the so-called Real Sopranos came the closest to committing local acts of mob mayhem.

That planned action, the murder of an Elizabeth, New Jersey-based wiseguy by a trio of DeCavalcante gangsters led by Las Vegas-based capo Charles (Charlie The Hat) Stango was forestalled and stopped cold by an undercover FBI probe. That led to the arrests of Stango, his son, and eight others on a slew of charges ranging from murder conspiracy to selling untaxed cigarettes.

The long-running mob investigation — an FBI rarity these days — was similar to dozens of sting operations that former ace undercover G-man Joaquim (Big Jack) Garcia and his crew of agents ran against mobsters, drug dealers and corrupt law enforcement officials during his amazing 26-year-long career. The Stango case gets Gang Land's nod as the Best Mob Prosecution of 2015.

During the three-year probe, Charlie The Hat was heard telling the wired-up undercover agent to either kill an "out of control" mob rival or "maim him or you just gotta put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life." That discussion was recorded during a talk they had in Las Vegas, 15 miles from where the 72-year-old Stango had lived since 2012, when he was released following a 13 year sentence for racketeering and murder. He's been detained without bail since his arrest in March.

So far, six co-defendants, including Stango's wannabe wiseguy son, Anthony (Whitey) Stango, have either copped plea deals or have agreed to plead guilty to charges including coke dealing, promoting prostitution, and weapons charges rather than take their chances at trial.

Court records indicate that lawyers for the elder Stango and for two other septuagenarian gangsters charged with conspiring with Charlie The Hat to whack mobster Luigi (Dog) Oliveri — family consigliere Frank (Snipe) Nigro and associate Paul (Knuckles) Colella — have been discussing a possible plea deal with the feds. The case, which has been adjourned several times, was recently put off again until February.

Nigro, 73, and Colella, 70, allegedly discussed the plot to kill Oliveri, according to an arrest complaint by FBI agent Robert Conrad, and are also charged with murder conspiracy. They were both released on bail and are currently under strict house arrest restrictions.

Oliveri was alerted about the alleged plot to kill him by the FBI, and was later charged in a separate complaint with the relatively minor crime of selling untaxed cigarettes to an undercover agent on the same day the others were arrested. But the legal situation surrounding the intended murder victim is unclear. There has been no movement on his case since late March. His attorney, James Plaisted, and prosecutors James Donnelly and Grady O'Malley declined to comment.

The lone victim of mob violence this year was already behind bars. He is Albert (Albee) Crisci, a DeCavalcante associate with his own New Jersey ties who switched his allegiances to the Gambinos, only to get sent to prison for drug dealing. In July, Crisci suffered a broken jaw and possible permanent eye damage in a brutal assault in a yard at the federal prison in Fairton, New Jersey.

Sources say Crisci, 41, was beaten so badly that he was taken to a local hospital, where his jaw was wired up and he underwent emergency surgery in an effort to save his vision. He was later moved to a federal prison hospital in Massachusetts to convalesce. Due for release in May, he was transferred to a New York halfway house last month. Officials, who initially feared Crisci might suffer brain damage and loss of an eye, declined to discuss his current health.

It seems that Crisci, who has a tattoo on his chest of a smiling young boy whose face is in flames saying, "Those who tell shall burn in hell," apparently has mob heaven in his sights. Sources say he has declined to finger his assailants. Sources say the four beating suspects, Gambino soldier Thomas Orefice, Colombo wiseguy Joseph Savarese, and Bonanno mobsters John (Johnny Joe) Spirito and Fabrizio (The Herder) DeFrancisi, have also kept their mouths shut, and for all intents and purposes, the case is closed.

Sources say that several of the suspects, who allegedly pummeled Crisci in a prison yard area that was in a blind spot without video camera coverage, still remain in a segregated housing unit.

This year's other big mob dust up was also a prison brawl. That one was a battle royal between wiseguys and Albanian gangsters at the federal facility in Danbury and ended without any charges being filed. As punishment though, prison officials gave many alleged participants, including Gambino soldiers Michael (Mikey Y) Yannotti and Michael (Roc) Roccaforte, and Colombo associate Vito Guzzo a Westward Ho Award. All were shipped far from the Connecticut prison, making visits by family and friends much more time consuming, and costly. Yannotti and Roccaforte are in separate California prisons; Guzzo is in Texas.

Diane Ferrone and Elizabeth Macedonio are Gang Land's Defense Lawyers Of The Year for orchestrating Vinny Asaro's acquittal of the storied Lufthansa heist, the murder of a suspected informer, and extortion charges despite the overwhelming proof against him. There was so much evidence against him that Asaro appeared just as shocked by the not guilty verdict as the prosecution team headed by Nicole Argentieri, deputy chief of the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office. There was also overwhelming evidence, however, that Asaro had been broke and largely out of things in recent years.

That view was dramatically enhanced for the jury by defense attorney Ferrone who gets an added award for coming up with the year's Best Defense Graphic. It was the two-page exhibit with a pair of binoculars superimposed over the 33 names of present and former law enforcement folks who took pictures of Vinny Asaro not committing any crimes over the years that she flashed on a big screen for jurors to look at during Macedonio's closing argument.

Brooklyn Jurist Speaks Unvarnished Truth In Written Opinions

Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Raymond Dearie gets the Howard Cosell Tell It Like It Is award for his remarks in two important pre-trial rulings. One involves a 2015 prosecution of a mob-connected family charged with using a Queens Italian restaurant as the base of operations for an international coke smuggling ring. The other involved police corruption going back 30 years.

In October, Dearie ripped the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office he headed in the 1980s for issuing unlawful grand jury subpoenas during its probe of Gregorio and Eleonora Gigliotti and their son Angelo. He also ordered the office to give him a report on how long it had been doing that and to let him know what the office has done to correct the practice.

The subpoenas, as Gang Land reported last month, contained an improper directive, in capital letters, ordering recipients not to disclose the existence of the subpoena, something the office had no legal right to do, since recipients of grand jury subpoenas are free to discuss them. Citing the illegal subpoenas, defense lawyers asked Dearie to block prosecutors from using the evidence.

Last week, Dearie refused to suppress the information, but citing the unlawful subpoenas as "cause for serious concern," the judge ripped prosecutors for failing to give him a full accounting of "the scope of the problem and the Office's plan to address it" as he had directed, and for their "rather glib explanation that the violations were simply 'inadvertent and unintentional.'"

Dearie wrote that the letter the Court received from assistant U.S. attorney James Miskiewicz explaining that the faulty language in the subpoenas had been "missed by (him) when the subpoenas were finalized by support staff" was a "curious representation to the Court."

"The Court takes little comfort in the fact that the Office's official policy conforms to" the appropriate rules involving grand jury subpoenas since "such policy was violated multiple times here, and it is apparent that such violations are not isolated to this case," wrote Dearie. He also noted that a defense attorney had recalled a "similar incident" in 2006. According to prosecutors Miskiewicz, Margaret Gandy and Nicole Argentieri, three of the 38 subpoenas were improper.

In plain, stern language, the Judge warned the government to mend its ways or be prepared to pay the consequences in the future.

"A word of caution, however, to the government," he wrote. "This ruling is not meant to suggest that suppression, as drastic a remedy as it may be, or other significant sanctions, might not be available to a court should practices of this sort persist. Indeed, now that the government is unambiguously on notice of this problem and the need to correct it, continued violations could well warrant severe remedies."

"The Court's bigger concern," Dearie continued, "is that the Office has not yet taken adequate steps to prevent violations of this sort from happening again. The government has yet to explain, in specific terms, how it will ensure compliance with its policy moving forward, and it has yet to reassure the Court that it has adequately conveyed the seriousness of this issue to all of its AUSAs. The government proceeds at its peril."

A spokeswoman for Robert Capers, who has worked in the office since 2003 but took over as U.S. Attorney in October, six months after the Gigliottis were arrested, declined to say whether Capers intended to "reassure" Dearie that all AUSAs understand the "seriousness of this issue" or respond to the Judge's stated concerns regarding about the office's "compliance with its policy moving forward."

That kind of unvarnished truth-telling was also on display in a civil case this year when Dearie examined the 30 year old record of the 1985 NYPD Departmental Trial of detective Louis Eppolito. At that trial, the rogue detective was exonerated of giving Rosario Gambino copies of NYPD files that were found in a raid of the mobster's apartment a year earlier by the FBI. The acquittal came even though Eppolito's fingerprints were found on the photocopies, establishing that he had touched the documents discovered by the FBI.

In a scathing 40-page opinion Dearie wrote that Eppolito had been "caught red-handed" passing the documents to the mobster and ripped then-police Commission Ben Ward, NYPD Trial Judge Hugh Mo and every police official who had a hand in allowing Eppolito to keep his badge and not fire him for corrupt activities despite "overwhelming evidence" of his guilt.

Dearie's scalding decision helped convince the city to settle seven wrongful death claims, and pay $18.4 million to relatives of persons who were murdered by Mafia Cops Eppolito and Steve Caracappa or their mob cohorts.

There was a triple dead heat for Dumbfella Of The Year Award. It's being shared by Michael Persico, the son of the so-far imprisoned for life Colombo boss Carmine (Junior) Persico, and Genovese crime family associates Michael (Mikey Y) Palazzolo and Pasquale (Pat) Stiso.

Persico gets his for doing his damnedest to take back the spectacular plea deal he got in 2012 – a recommended sentence of 37-46 months and a maximum of five years – to resolve murder and racketeering charges that carried life behind bars. Palazzolo earned it by pushing the feds to hit him with more extortion charges before taking a plea deal calling for two years more than the one he was first offered. Stiso gets his for rejecting a likely sentence of probation, getting convicted of a $3.5 million fraud at trial, and facing about eight years in the slammer.

Persico's efforts to rescind his guilty plea has had some positive aspects, though. So for delaying his sentencing for 42 months, he gets a First Degree Procrastination Award for enabling him to celebrate Christmas with his long-suffering mother Joyce four years in a row, and for having a chance — a remote one to be sure — to spend some time at home with his dad, who's been behind bars for 30 years.

That brings us to Carmine Persico. While Junior adds yet another year to his unenviable record as the Mafia Boss With The Most Consecutive Years Behind Bars in 2015, there may be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for the 82-year-old mobster. The assertions of wrongdoing by the feds put forward by attorney Anthony DePietro in his motion to have his 100 year sentence vacated, have not been disputed by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office, which has asked Judge Kevin Duffy to reject Persico's motion for technical reasons.

Duffy has a reputation for ruffling prosecutors' feathers when he believes they've screwed up. But he's also got a a well-earned rep for meting out heavy sentences in mob cases. That was on display in 1974 when he gave mobster Louis (Gigi The Whale) Inglese 40 years on top of 16 and a half he was serving, Inglese told Duffy he didn't think he could do 56 and a half years. The judge smiled and said simply, "Do the best you can."

Four Turncoat Anthonys Rewarded With Lenient Sentences

DeCavalcante capo Anthony Rotondo, a prolific prosecution witness who testified at seven trials against mobsters from four families from 2003 to 2007, led a small group of mob defectors — all of them, remarkably, named Anthony — who won lenient prison terms this year for switching sides and teaming up with their Uncle Sam.

Rotondo officially flipped in 2002 but began spilling his guts to the feds two years earlier. He is viewed today by the feds as "an incredibly valuable witness," and was sentenced by Manhattan Federal Judge Jed Rakoff to "time served" during a session that was also a mini-reunion of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who worked with Rotondo over the past 15 years.

The sentencing documents and the transcript of the November 10 proceeding were originally sealed, but following two written requests by Gang Land, Judge Rakoff unsealed them last week, with minor redactions for security reasons.

The unsealed transcript shows that assistant U.S. attorney Miriam Rocah began the session by announcing that, along with Seamus McElearney, the FBI agent in Rotondo's case, two former prosecutors who used his testimony at trials, Michael McGovern and John Hillebrecht, were also seated at the government table.

"I guess I'm glad they are here because now they are in private practice and have nothing better to do," said Rakoff, setting a light hearted tone for the brief proceeding. Then he looked around and asked who else was present in the sealed courtroom.

When Rocah responded that the other four persons were FBI agents, the judge cracked: "Well, I know from their haircuts they were FBI agents, but maybe we should just have their names on the record."

For the record, according to the transcript, the four agents seated in the spectator session were Jay Kramer, Christopher Degraff, Christopher Hudson, and John Penza.

On Rotondo's behalf, Rocah stressed that his cooperation was more valuable than his impressive stats, which included scores of mobsters and associates from five families. She said his high rank, "a powerful capo," and because he was "among the first dominoes to fall in a series of prosecutions by this office," that led to more indictments, "more defections, and on and on."

Rotondo, a college graduate who followed his old man into the mob and admitted four murders and countless other crimes , expressed regret for his life of crime, the record shows. "Most importantly," he said, "I'd like to apologize for my past life, to all of the victims, their families. I can't take that back, but I'll carry it with me for the rest of my life."

Since Rotondo has had no problems with the law since his release on bail 11 years ago, Rakoff agreed not to impose any period of supervised release for the 58-year-old turncoat.

Anthony Cooperator No. 2 was Anthony Zoccolillo, the former co-star of Mama's Boys From The Bronx who was Gang Land's Most Effective Mob Turncoat of 2014. Zoccolillo also received "time served" when he was rewarded for making drug cases against mobsters and associates of two crime families. Zoccolillo, who had spent 18 months behind bars, was also given five years of supervised release.

Number three was Anthony (Tony Lodi) Cardinalle, who ran the Bada Bing, the jiggle joint that served as the headquarters for fictional TV mobster Tony Soprano, was rewarded with a 30 day sentence for racketeering in return for his cooperation against real life Genovese mobsters and associates who were indicted on labor racketeering charges.

Last but not least was Anthony Basile, a Bonanno associate who flipped after being convicted of a 1992 mob murder. He gets the Cooperator From Hell Award. He lied to the feds, gave them useless information, helped convict no one, smuggled drugs into a prison, and had two cooperation agreements breached. When it was time for sentencing, prosecutor Elizabeth Geddes, citing that and more, asked for a life sentence, but Judge Nicholas Garaufis disagreed. He decreed that Basile had provided helpful info, and gave him 12 years. He's slated to be released this coming summer.

The award for bringing the worst date to a Gotti family wedding goes to Frank Morano, the Sunday morning radio talk show host on 970 AM The Answer, and good friend of John (Junior) Gotti his oldest sister Angel, and Mrs. Victoria Gotti, the widow of the late Dapper Don.

We're calling this one the Morning After Award, not for its usual connotation but because Morano's date was such a horror that he began his show the next morning by detailing her conduct and asking listeners for suggestions on how to placate the hard feelings that his date caused everyone at the affair — particularly Junior's mother-in-law.

The wedding celebration, for Angel Gotti's son Frank and his bride Laurie Ann, took place on December 5 at the Bourne Mansion in Oakdale, L.I. According to Morano it was a spectacular affair, with great food, continuous music that was not too loud.

Morano's unidentified date, whom he called "Nancy," was "effervescent, dancing all over the place" and "drinking like crazy," he said. But by the end of the affair, she had "crossed the line from cute, playfully drunk to too drunk" and insulted Gotti's mother-in-law, Mary Jo Albanese, and her late mother, as the two women discussed their astrological signs.

One minute they were "laughing" and "best friends," Morano said but seconds later he was "freaking out" when he heard Nancy's rejoinder when Mrs. Albanese's stated that her mother, just like Nancy, was also a Taurus — giving his AM radio audience a toned-down version of the racy language, which Gang Land will state verbatim, as reported by Gang Land.

"Fuck your mother, no one gives a shit about your mother, this is about me, I'm a Taurus," said "Nancy."

"I give a shit about my mother," replied Mrs. Albanese, whose smile turned icy cold and angry and who Morano recalled "storms away and was seething and doing all she could to keep from coming back and smacking 'Nancy.'"

Morano quickly hustled his date out of the gala affair, after he and she — probably with some arm twisting — apologized profusely to Mrs. Albanese, and everyone else, the radio host said, adding that the entire Gotti family, in particular, the erstwhile Gambino family boss, was very gracious and considerate about the totally unwarranted conduct by his drunk and disorderly date.

[Pogo The Clown]

Thanks for posting this weeks column Dellacroce. Happy New Year.


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