Gangland 8/18/22

[Dr031718]

Bonannos Charged With Teaming Up With The Genoveses In One Gambling Parlor; And Using A 'Dirty' Cop To Double Cross Them In Another Venture

The feds say a gaggle of Bonanno and Genovese gangsters joined forces to run a "lucrative illegal gambling operation" at the Gran Caffe Gelateria in Lynbrook, where you could also get dozens of flavors of gelato along with espresso and the Italian pastry of your choice. That ended Tuesday with the arrests of eight suspects and the filing of two indictments that also charge the Bonannos with using a corrupt detective to play dirty with their Genovese cohorts.

The Genovese family half of the operation was allegedly headed by capo Carmelo (Carmine Pizza) Polito. The feds say his underlings, Salvatore (Sal the Shoemaker) Rubino and Joseph (Joe Box) Rutigliano "collected the proceeds for the Genovese crime family and distributed them up to higher ranking members."

The Bonanno family end of the Gran Caffe caper, which "typically earned over $10,000 a week," was run by capo Anthony (Little Anthony) Pipitone, 49, and his mobster brother Vito, 40, according to Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace. Seven defendants were hit with racketeering and money laundering charges. One Bonanno associate was charged with illegal gambling.

Sources say the gambling earnings from the joint operation flowed up the chain to the chieftains of each family, namely Genovese boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo, and Bonanno boss Michael (Mikey Nose) Mancuso.

Nassau Detective Hector Rosario is accused of selling his badge to the Bonanno crime family, to the detriment of the Genovese crime family. Federal prosecutors allege that Rosario, a 15-year-veteran of the Nassau PD, agreed to "use his position as a police detective to raid competing gambling businesses" in exchange for cash.

Rosario is charged in the Bonanno family indictment with obstructing a federal grand jury in Brooklyn. He is also charged with lying to the FBI in 2020 about a separate Genovese family gambling operation that Genovese associate Sal the Shoemaker Rubino ran in Merrick at his place of business, Sal's Shoe's Repair.

Prosecutors Tanya Hajjar, Drew Rolle, Anna Karamigios and Abigail Margulies wrote that Rosario agreed to raid the Genovese business run by Sal the Shoemaker for the Bonannos. But during a January 2020 interview, the feds say he "made materially false statements" to FBI agents about that by "denying any knowledge of Sal’s Shoe Repair."

Rosario, 49, is also accused of lying to the agents when he denied knowing a "member of the Bonanno crime family" that the agents asked him about, the prosecutors stated in a bail memo to Magistrate Judge James Cho.

In a news release, Peace stated that "the shameful conduct of the detective who betrayed his oath of office and the honest men and women of the Nassau County Police Department" was "even more disturbing" than the racketeering and money laundering charges that were lodged against the mob connected defendants.

The indictments of the inducted mobsters from the Genovese and Bonanno "crime families demonstrate that the Mafia continues to pollute our communities with illegal gambling, extortion and violence while using our financial system in service to their criminal schemes," Peace stated. The FBI, NYPD, Nassau County District Attorney's Office, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Waterfront Commission took part in the four-year-long investigation.

Peace didn't finger any allegedly violent gangsters in his news release, but in a court filing, his prosecutors singled out Polito, 63, of Whitestone, Queens, for threatening to "break" the "face" of one deadbeat gambler and then ordeing an underling to tell the debtor in 2019 that Polito was "going to put him under the fucking bridge" if he didn't fork over the money he owed.

"Polito has a serious criminal history," the prosecutors wrote, asking Judge Cho to set bail at $4 million. In their filing they noted that he has prior convictions "of significant acts of violence" and argued that as "an acting captain," he poses a "significant threat" if released on bail "because he has the ability to direct those who report to him to commit crimes on his behalf."

In 2003, they wrote, Polito was convicted of killing mob rival Tino Lombardi, and the attempted murder of his cousin, Michael (Cookie) D'Urso in 1994 to "maintain or increase" his status with the crime family and sentenced to life. But on technical grounds — the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that he "had several motives for wanting to kill the victims" — his conviction was thrown out, and he was acquitted at a state court trial in 2007.

Attorney Gerald McMahon, who defended Polito at both trials, convinced Cho that a $1.1 million bond was sufficient. The lawyer told Gang Land he was "shocked" by the gambling charges against his client: "Gambling is legal everywhere in America — except in the Eastern District of New York, for Italian Americans," McMahon said.

Since his acquittal in 2007, Polito has risen in stature. He is no longer a debt-ridden, ex-bank robber and low-level associate whose cohorts once feared he might flip but a well-respected wiseguy in the crime family with a substantial loanshark book. His Carmine Pizza nickname stems from the Astoria-based pizzeria, Polito's Pizza, he operated for years, but has since closed.

He owns a handful of homes and properties worth millions of dollars, and in recent years, as Gang Land reported in 2020, Polito was inducted into the crime and quickly promoted to capo with the backing of Barney Bellomo. Polito is listed as an acting capo in the Genovese family indictment, which also charges him with running an online sports betting website and the attempted extortion of the gambler whose face he threatened to break.

D'Urso, who lived to testify about his 1994 shooting at two trials, was quick to slam Polito and wondered "how the Genovese crime family could make such a degenerate gambler" when contacted by Gang Land.

"When scumbags like Carmime Polito, who washed out cars and picked up our fucking laundry get straightened out, the life is over," said D'Urso. Polito owed the ex-gangster $60,000 and was why he was Carmine Pizza's main target during a card game at the San Giuseppe Social Club in Willimssburg. D'Urso survived a bullet in the head. Lombardi didn't.

When a guy like Polito, who has no balls and was a gofer for real gangsters gets made, guys like me are happy to be where we are, and not where he is," said D'Urso, who flipped four years later and helped the feds convict dozens of wiseguys, including Bellomo and the legendary Oddfather Vincent (Chin) Gigante of racketeering charges.

The Genoveses operated joker poker-type gambling machines, poker games, and scala quaranta, an Italian card game similar to Rummy at Sal's Shoe Repair in Merrick and at the Centro Calcio Italiano Club in West Babylon. The Bonannos ran their games at the La Nazionale Soccer Club and the Glendale Sports Club in Queens and the Soccer Club in Valley Stream, according to the indictments.

All of the defendants, except for Rutigliano, who was not arrested, were released on bonds from a high of $2 million for Little Anthony Pipitone to a low of $150,000 for Sal the Shoemaker and are slated to appear for a status conference next month.

Rubino and his wife were unhappy he had to wear an ankle bracelet at his son's wedding later this month. And attorney Walter Mack argued long and hard against it. But Judge Cho refused to budge. "Nobody's going to notice it unless you wear shorts," said the judge.

'The Mob Did It,' A Likely Defense For Anthony Zottola In The Murder Of His Father

Attorneys for Anthony Zottola, who is charged with plotting his dad's murder, are hot on the trail of four-year-old assertions by two confidential FBI informants that were recently turned over to the defense. The informants claimed that the "Mafia" killed Bonanno associate Sylvester (Sally Daz) Zottola and that "members of Italian organized crime" were responsible for the attempted murder of his son Salvatore, Gang Land has learned.

In several filings with Brooklyn Federal Judge Raymond Dearie, who stepped off the case recently, and with newly assigned Judge Hector Gonzalez, lawyers for Zottola have complained that the FBI memos are so-called Brady Material that should have been turned over years ago but were only disclosed a month before trial.

They also say the memos have been so heavily redacted that it was difficult for them to adequately investigate the information before the start of trial.

Plainly the information provided by these witnesses is classic Brady material," attorneys Henry Mazurek and Ilana Haramati told Dearie in seeking details to make the information meaningful. "The Second Circuit has been unequivocal that such 'disclosures must be sufficiently specific and complete to be useful' to the defense," they wrote.

Regarding the July 11, 2018 drive-by shooting of Salvatore Zottola in front of his Bronx home, the attorneys wrote that "the government produced a heavily redacted" account dated a week later which did not include the informer's name, or the names of the FBI agents, "rendering this information functionally useless."

In a follow-up letter to Gonzalez on Tuesday, the lawyers noted that in response to an order from Dearie to provide them the information they needed, the prosecutors did not give them the name of the informer, but instead gave them the name of the attorney who had been appointed to represent the snitch.

That was useless information, they wrote, since the lawyer, Matthew Galluzzo, "declined to provide us with the name of his client, or to accept service of a subpoena for his client." Zottola's attorneys asked Gonzalez to order the prosecutors to give them the informer's "name and contact information" so they can subpoena him "to testify at the trial starting later this month."

When Gang Land checked the docket sheet yesterday afternoon, neither the government, nor Judge Gonzalez had responded to that letter.

It's likely that the Zottola defense team had better success locating the informer who spoke to the FBI about the October 4, 2018 murder of Sally Daz after they complained to Judge Dearie about a December 12, 2018 report stating that "the mafia, not Mr. Zottola, was responsible for the murder of Sylvester Zottola."

The lawyers requested the blacked out names of the FBI agents who had interviewed that informer, whom the prosecutors had named, because they and their investigators had found "more than 80 people" with the same name in the New York area, "many of whom presumptively fit the age and location profile of the witness."

The lawyers did not respond to several requests for comment, but since they have not followed up with any additional requests for help from the Court regarding that Brady Material, it's very likely that they have been able to locate and interview him about his information.

In denying separate trials for Zottola and Bloods leader Bushawn (Shelz) Shelton, Dearie wrote that he doubted that either defendant would use the defense strategy that their lawyers posited in their motions for separated trials.

"Zottola," the judge wrote, "intends to offer the defense that Shelton 'misled Mr. Zottola for the purpose of getting close to (his) brother and father in an effort to encroach on their cash businesses'" in an attempt to "show that Shelton 'double crossed' Zottola while 'staking out the means to harm Zottola's family.'"

Judge Raymond Dearie"Shelton," Dearie wrote, "intends to offer the defense that 'Mr. Zottola manipulated and used Mr. Shelton as a patsy for [Zottola's] own nefarious plot to kill his own family," a defense the judge also questioned and doubted would be offered.

"It seems unlikely, in light of the years-long relationship between Zottola and Shelton, for either defendant to assign murder to the other's intentions," he wrote, noting that "despite rhetorical flourishes," the lawyers for both defendants had "hardly committed to pursuing such potentially risky defense strategies, which have been articulated with minimal detail."

Meanwhile, questionnaires were distributed Tuesday to 400 potential jurors for the anonymous and partially sequestered jury that will be selected for the six-to-eight week trial that is slated to begin with jury selection on August 24, with opening statements tentatively set for August 29.

Capo Heading Back To The Slammer Is A Fourth Generation Wiseguy With Roots In The Old Country

Bonanno capo Jerome (Jerry) Asaro was carrying out a longstanding Asaro family tradition when he was busted for helping his mob boss Michael (Mikey Nose) Mancuso conduct crime family business that sent him back to prison for four months. Asaro's mob heritage is a lot richer than the two generations that Gang Land credited him when we reported his sentencing for violating his post-prison supervised release two weeks ago.

In fact, knowledgeable Gang Land sources say Jerry Asaro's Cosa Nostra bloodlines go back more than 125 years to the old country where his great grandfather and other relatives were members of the bourghata from Castellammare del Golfo, the same region in Sicily where Bonanno crime family patriarch Joe Bonanno emigrated from.

Jerry Asaro' mob lineage as a fourth generation Asaro family member in the crime family is detailed in court records filed in the case in which his father Vincent was acquitted of the $6 million Lufthansa Airlines Robbery. In that case, Jerry pleaded guilty to reburying the body of an informer who was allegedly killed in 1969 by his dad and the mastermind of the storied heist, James (Jimmy The Gent) Burke.

The 62-year-old Bonanno skipper was named after his grandfather, Giralamo (Jerry) Asaro, a powerful capo in the 1960s with financial interests in several Queens and Long Island companies. His granddad was a close associate of the crime family's official boss Philip (Rusty) Rastelli during the 1970s, according to a knowing Gang Land source.

"Jerry (Giralamo) Asaro was a very respected man in his day," said the source. "He was an old school wiseguy and a close friend of Phil Rastelli."

Giralamo took part in assaults and extortions with his son Vincent during the 1960s, according to court records. He had arrests for gambling, arson, grand larceny, and running an illegal still, according to a five part series in Newsday about the so-called "Bonanno War" between rival factions of the family after Joe Bonanno was deposed by the Mafia Commission.

Giralamo, who died in the 1970s, was one of many mobsters who were subpoenaed to testify before grand juries in Brooklyn and Nassau County that were investigating the "Bonanno war," according to reports by Newsday's highly-respected organized crime reporter Tom Renner. Giralamo lived in Long Beach, and owned a fence company in Island Park, Renner wrote.

Sources say that was the same fence company that Vincent Asaro discussed during a taped-talk in which Asaro complained about his son Jerome to his wired-up cousin Gaspare (Gary) Valenti in a taped talk that was played at the 2015 Lufthansa Robbery trial.

During that conversation, Vinny Asaro, a terrible gambler, complained that his son Jerome would not help him out with any cash even though he had proposed him for induction, and had given Jerome the fence company.

"My son's a real scumbag," he said. "Not a fucking penny, not a fucking dime. He broke my fucking heart."

Jerome's great uncle on his mother's side, Michael (Mickey Zaff) Zaffarano, was also a Bonanno crime family heavyweight. "Mickey was (Giralamo's) brother-in-law," the source said. A family capo, Zaffarano was a close associate of Carmine (Lilo) Galante, who bullied his way to the top of the crime family when he got out of prison in 1973 but was killed for his efforts as he dined in an outdoor patio of a Brooklyn restaurant in July of 1979.

Zaffarino , a millionaire real estate developer known as the "King of Porn" for a New York to California racket with locations in many cities across the country, was indicted in the FBI's celebrated "MiPorn" case in 1980, but dropped dead of a heart attack on the day of his planned arrest when he tried to flee.

"They (Giralamo and Zaffarano) were pretty active players in their time," said Gang Land's source. "Both of them put together had a hard time controlling the young Vinny, who was still out of control as an old man," the source continued, referring to his arrest for a 2012 road rage arson he committed at the age of 74.

Zaffarano's great-nephew Jerome is slated to begin serving a four month stretch for violating his supervised release in October. That same month, Bonanno boss Mikey Nose Mancuso is slated for a hearing on his own violation of supervised release charge with sentencing guidelines up to 11 months behind bars.

[Dr031718]

[AnIrishGuy]

Thanks for posting (and the formatting).

Great Gl this week. Walter Mack now on the bad guy's side.

[Antiliar]

Looks like Capeci may have been reading some of our posts about Asaro

[rolotomasi]

Thanks you a lot

[AntComello]

Thanks for posting. So the bananas and genovese have a joint gambling operation going but the bananas use thier crooked cop to bust the other genovese gambling spots. Pretty grimey but not surprising; I’m sure Barney isn’t happy about that.

[TommyNoto]

Mikey nose is likely going back to jail ?

Big news Bonnanos ratted out Genovese gambling operation . That’s a serious event for the admin’s to work out

Outside of the cop this looks like a BS case , not sure any jury will give jail time to non violent gambling

It looks like Feds are trying to slow down big Westside crews with these minor busts , perhaps they can’t get anything with teeth, IDK but these busts aren’t happening in NJ. Seems a lot easier to be a wise guy in NJ these days , a lot less LE resources

[AntComello]

Mikey nose is likely going back to jail ?

Big news Bonnanos ratted out Genovese gambling operation . That’s a serious event for the admin’s to work out

Outside of the cop this looks like a BS case , not sure any jury will give jail time to non violent gambling

It looks like Feds are trying to slow down big Westside crews with these minor busts , perhaps they can’t get anything with teeth, IDK but these busts aren’t happening in NJ. Seems a lot easier to be a wise guy in NJ these days , a lot less LE resources

Only one threat of violence lol I don’t see them getting hammered at all. And sounds like your right about the feds doing whatever they can to slow down the Genovese. Wonder when if ever we will have a big bust. These lame gambling busts are boring lol

[sisterray]

Mikey nose is likely going back to jail ?

Big news Bonnanos ratted out Genovese gambling operation . That’s a serious event for the admin’s to work out

Outside of the cop this looks like a BS case , not sure any jury will give jail time to non violent gambling

It looks like Feds are trying to slow down big Westside crews with these minor busts , perhaps they can’t get anything with teeth, IDK but these busts aren’t happening in NJ. Seems a lot easier to be a wise guy in NJ these days , a lot less LE resources

I’m wondering how this and the recent situation at Grimaldi’s funeral will factor into Mancuso’s recognition by the other families. The Bonannos seem to have been a total mess under his leadership, even by modern day LCN standards.

[JohnnyS]

Thanks for posting. That's the first time I've ever seen a pic of D'Urso.

[NYNighthawk]

so barney was getting a cut? How do we drag him into the courtroom on this?

[Amershire_Ed]

None of these guys will do more than a few years. Barney can’t be happy his name is in the press like this though. He’s got all kinds of wealth from legitimate sources, I’d legit be surprised if he was really taking a kick from this venture.

[Waingro]

Thanks for posting.

[PolackTony]

Looks like Capeci may have been reading some of our posts about Asaro

I was thinking the same thing lol.

[PolackTony]

Big news Bonnanos ratted out Genovese gambling operation . That’s a serious event for the admin’s to work out

The ball’s in your court Barney — it’s your move!!