Gangland 6/29/2023

[Dr031718]

Like Father, Like Son — In Many Ways, Including Crime And Making Nice With The Feds

The federal robbery case of Vincent (Vinnie Mercedes) Salanardi, the Colombo associate whose well-planned holdup of a prominent restaurant owner went bad when the victim pulled out a gun and started shooting, has been mysteriously transferred to a senior judge who handled a case involving the defendant's father two decades ago, Gang Land has learned.

The newly assigned jurist is Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who just so happens to have presided over the 2002 racketeering case of Vinnie Mercedes's old man, turncoat Luchese mobster Vincent (Vinny Baldy) Salanardi. Garaufis is apparently not worried about getting the two confused, as he has stated emphatically that he's keeping the case in which Vinnie Mercedes is charged with robbing $10,000 from hotshot restaurateur Alessandro (Alex) Borgognone.

The Salanardis, father Vinny Baldy, 59, and son Vinnie Mercedes, 31, have different nicknames, and different crime family affiliations. But it's very likely, Gang Land has learned, that they have something else in common: the art of cooperating with law enforcement.

Vinny Baldy flipped in 2003 after he was indicted along with dozens of Lucheses on racketeering charges. Vinnie Mercedes flipped and became a cooperating witness after he was arrested in 2014 and charged as the getaway driver in a string of armed robberies of Staten Island gas stations, according to court records in his 2014 case.

At the time, according to a prosecutor in that case, "half the Staten Island Police Department was out looking" for the two men who had "terrorized Staten Island for weeks." The crew was believed to have robbed between "eight and ten" gas stations, as well as several Radio Shack stores during a gunpoint robbery spree that began in August of 2013.

Salanardi, and his accomplice, Robert Stewart, became suspects in the robberies when two alert cops noticed during a "traffic stop" that Vinnie Mercedes and Stewart "matched the description of the robbery suspects," according to an arrest complaint by ATF agent Anthony Melchiorri that was filed in February of 2015.

During a subsequent interview, Melchiorri stated that Vinnie Mercedes admitted being the getaway driver in four gas station stickups, as well as a Radio Shack robbery. He also allegedly fessed up to other unreported armed robberies of a gas station and a delicatessen in which Stewart was the gunman who demanded cash from the victims.

In a search of his cell phone, authorities retrieved a photo of Vinnie Mercedes Salanardi "holding two guns inside what appeared to be Stewart's residence" at the time, the affidavit stated.

Around the same time that Vinnie Mercedes was on his robbery spree, dad Vinny Baldy Salanardi was just finishing a long stretch behind bars for racketeering, extortion and drug dealing in 2012. He was quickly charged with kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, a stun gun, according to a court filing in the elder Salanardi's case.

Arrested in April of 2014 on those charges, which stemmed from a violation of his supervised release (VOSR), Vinny Baldy was accused of six separate charges, including meeting with an ex-con and with failing to follow instructions of his probation officer. He was jailed as a danger to the community, according to court filings in the case.

Back in December of 2002, Judge Garaufis had detained Vinny Baldy as a danger to the community when prosecutors gave the judge dozens of transcripts of threats that the defendant had uttered during a long-running racketeering scheme by the Luchese crime family, including an effort to extort $10,000 a night from the owners of a popular Freeport, L.I nightclub.

"If I stick my foot down your fucking throat and break your fucking jaw and forget about the $5000, are you going to be happy," Salanardi was overheard telling another extortion victim. "Make sure you've got the whole balance you owe me on fucking Friday, you understand, or fucking Saturday you're gonna be planted in the fucking hospital."

Vinny Baldy, who had never killed anyone, according to court filings, decided to cooperate. Based on his information, the feds arrested more gangsters on a variety of charges. But he couldn't help himself. Instead of remaining on the straight and narrow, Vinny Baldy continued collecting extortion payments while he was cooperating and prosecutors breached his cooperation agreement, and Garaufis sentenced him to 11 years behind bars and gave him five years of post-prison supervised release.

In August of 2014, Judge Garaufis sentenced Vinny Baldy to 11 months in prison and four more years of post-prison supervised release for the kidnapping VOSR. The judge also ordered the Bureau of Prisons to have him serve his time in the "western part of the United States to avoid any interaction with (New York) members of organized crime."

Vinny Baldy served his time, and completed his four additional years of supervised release without any further problems.

As his dad's VOSR case proceeded before Judge Garaufis, Vinnie Mercedes pleaded guilty to his armed robbery charges. In August of 2015, he was sentenced to "time served" and three years of post-prison supervised release by Brooklyn Federal Judge Edward Korman. According to the BOP database, Vinnie Mercedes was released from prison on August 26, 2015.

Meanwhile, Stewart opted not to go to trial and risk confronting Vinnie Mercedes, who told the feds that Stewart had conducted surveillance of Radio Shack employees and was the driving force behind all the robberies. Instead, Stewart pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years in prison. He completed his prison term in 2020, and has had no further problems with the law.

Like Stewart, Vinnie Mercedes avoided any further issues with the feds. Until June 8.

That's when Vinny Mercedes was charged with orchestrating the November, 22, 2021 robbery of Borgognone as he left Baci Ristorante, his opulent 260-seat eatery in the Dongan Hills section of Staten Island with the night's receipts, and with escaping with $10,000 in cash, even though the restaurant owner shot and wounded the crew member, Anthony Caruso, who snatched the bag of loot from him.

Before and during Vinnie Mercedes's arraignment, his court appointed lawyer, Richard Levitt asked prosecutor Garen Marshall why the case, which had been randomly assigned to Judge Rachel Kovner, had been transferred to Judge Garaufis on June 14, since no reason was indicated on the docket sheet, according to a court filing by Levitt. He never got an answer, Levitt wrote, even when the Magistrate judge asked Marshall for the reason.

In his filing, Levitt did not accuse the government of "judge shopping" or any impropriety. He simply requested that the case either be "returned to Judge Kovner" or "randomly assigned to another judge" if she wasn't available since the lawyer "was aware of no authority that permitted the non-random reassignment to Your Honor."

In a brief docket entry, Garaufis stated that the Court's rules stated that "The Chief (Judge) may, at any time with consent of the judges involved, reassign individual cases between judges," and ruled that since reassignment is "entirely within the Chief Judge's discretion," Levitt's "letter motion in DENIED."

More Than A Century Later, Kudos For The Italian Squad

In 1960, Ernest Borgnine portrayed NYPD Detective Lieutenant Giuseppe (Joseph) Petrosino, the hero cop who was killed in 1909 by the Mafia in Sicily, in a movie about his life and death, Pay Or Die. In 1987, New York named a tiny city park on Lafayette Street, the same street where he lived and worked, to honor him.

Alfonso D'Arco, the late acting Luchese family boss, once had a restaurant facing the park. A history buff, D'Arco got a kick out of it. "I saw the movie where Borgnine plays the cop Petrosino," Little Al told Gang Land and Tom Robbins for our book, Mob Boss. "He's looking for the boss of the mob in Palermo, and the boss comes up to him and says, 'It's me.'"

That history is now revived — and expanded — in a fascinating new book by veteran NYC reporter Paul Moses. The Italian Squad details the often-unheralded work that Petrosino, who emigrated from Campania in 1872 at the age of 12, and dozens of unsung heroes of the elite squad of mostly Italian immigrants did against the mob more than 100 years ago despite overwhelming obstacles that included politics and a deeply ingrained prejudice against all Italian immigrants.

In 1904, when the NYPD created the Italian Squad after so-called Black Hand gangsters blew up homes and businesses of Italo-Americans and kidnapped a young boy, The New York Times didn't join terrified Italian merchants in pleading for "help from police" and in asking "fellow Italians" to "tell detectives what they knew about Black Hand threats," wrote author Moses.

Instead, Moses wrote, The Times "cast suspicion on all of the close to two million Italians" who began emigrating to New York in the first decade of the 20th Century. The Paper of Record, as it now likes to be known, blamed the new immigrants for becoming crime victims and opined that they, and New York, would be better served if they went back to where they had come from.

The controversy became heated following a spate of violence during the steamy July and August of 1904. It was a tense time. It was a year after two clever extortionists had begun a trend that was copied by hoodlums in cities across the U.S. where Italian immigrants had settled after the duo had sent a threatening letter to a Brooklyn contractor, and signed it, Mano Nero, or Black Hand, Moses wrote.

"A grocery at 252 Elizabeth Street was demolished in a bombing," while uptown a "beer party at 456 151st Street ended with an explosion that injured twenty people," Moses wrote. "Joseph Stravalli's barber shop at 417 Third Avenue was bombed to bits," and "eight-year-old Tony Mannino's kidnapping in Brooklyn was national news," the author continued.

"Protect ourselves we must," The Times declared on August 25, 1904, feeding growing fears that gangsters in a non-existent Secret Society of The Black Hand were everywhere. "We have too many bad Italians already, and since the good Italians generally refuse to give any information to the police which might assist them in their efforts to run down criminals of their race, we may be unable . . . to distinguish in every case the good Italian immigrant from the bad Italian immigrant."

Italian Squad detective Anthony Vachris had arrested the hoodlums who had started the Black Hand fury by threatening to blow up a contractor's home if he didn't fork over $10,000. They were convicted and "quickly sent up the river to Sing Sing," Moses wrote.

The Times continued its slurs on Italians in a 1906 editorial, and again in 1911, when it praised a judge for telling an Italian laborer he sentenced under New York's tough new gun law that it was passed to deal with "hot-headed and impulsive people of your race." In fact, Moses wrote, the impetus for the "Sullivan Law" stemmed from the murder of a novelist in Grammercy Park.

But The Times wasn't the only thorn in the side of The Italian Squad.

"Newspapers, especially The World, played up the Black Hand angle," Moses wrote. "In a splashy spread, the broadsheet sketched out a black-gloved fist thrusting a dagger toward the heart of a sad-eyed (victim.) It was an early chapter in the years of sensationalized and often inaccurate coverage of the so-called Black Hand, which the papers thoroughly confused with the Sicilian Mafia and Neapolitan Camorra."

After the Times's "protect ourselves, we must" stance, Petrosino told the Il Progresso that he was "besieged" by American newspaper reporters who wrote "that every stupid scam or criminal act committed by an Italian must be attributed to the now-famous Black Hand." He complained that a Harpers editor wasn't interested in "the facts of the story."

Petrosino's "facts" were that 97% of Italians were "law-abiding and hardworking, a number he arrived at by scrutinizing data for arrests and prison population," Moses wrote.

Even though the Italian Squad proved very successful at arresting the violent 3% of Italian immigrants — Petrosino insisted they were criminals who paid off corrupt Italian officials to leave Italy — it didn't help the stature of the honest 97% of Italians who had come to the U.S.

"When they caught those who blackmailed, kidnapped and bombed their fellow Italians," Moses wrote, "the cases were sensationalized in the press, which strengthened the idea that Italians were dangerous and unfit to be American citizens."

In The Italian Squad, Moses, a former Newsday reporter, historian, and Brooklyn College professor, dug into a range of sources, including city, state and federal documents, along with diaries of Italian Squad members to detail the work of a trio of detectives who led the squad after Petrosino's murder.

Three days after Petrosino was murdered, Tony Vachris traveled to Italy in what became a vain effort to capture his killers. Back home, until the squad was disbanded in 1922, he and his fellow Italian-American detectives, Charles Corrao, and Michael Fiaschetti did their best to protect their honest countrymen, women and children from their old-world predators, Moses wrote.

They "weren't able to change the way the larger society viewed Italian immigrants" and like their murdered leader, the author wrote, "they weren't able to stop the development of what became the American Mafia." And "their greatest quest, to sole Petrosino's murder, eluded them."

They helped folks "who were in the grips of traumatic events," Moses wrote. The victims included the internationally renowned tenor Enrico Caruso, "the bride who was raped and whose husband was murdered shortly after they arrived in America," as well as "the grocers, milk dealers, bankers, landlords" and others who "faced dire threats because their hard work had produced some material success."

"Petrosino, Vachris, Corrao, Fiaschetti, and the detectives who worked with them were willing to take great risks for them and many others like them," Moses wrote. "That is what made their work valuable and memorable."

For Gang Land's money, this book should be required reading for law enforcement, a reminder of how powerful organized crime can grow when it's ignored.

Feds Threw The Book At The Undertaker, And A Gang Land Photo Of Him With The Boss, And They Still Missed Their Mark

At yesterday's sentencing of Genovese capo Ralph (The Undertaker) Balsamo for racketeering and gambling, the feds went all out to convince a Manhattan Federal Court Judge to send the veteran mobster away for the max — 46 months — even pointing to an exclusive Gang Land photo of Balsamo helping Mafia Boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo celebrate his 65th birthday last year.

Prosecutor Celia Cohen cited the 30 years that Balsamo's been committing crimes for the Genovese family. She astutely noted that The Undertaker had previously pleaded guilty to racketeering charges that included drug dealing, extortion and labor racketeering from "the early 1990s through 2006" in the same case in which Bellomo had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison.

"During that period," Cohen stated, "Balsamo supervised narcotics trafficking, extorted money from a gambling enterprise, threatened a witness to prevent him from providing information to the FBI, and participated in a scheme to provide no-show union jobs to others." And his "family-owned funeral home," she wrote, was "a meeting place for members and associates of the Genovese family."

She described Balsamo as a dyed-in-the-wool mobster who had promised other judges he was sorry and would steer clear of illegal activity when he competed his sentence. He hadn't done so yet, she said, and would never do so, which was why he needed to be "incapacitated" for as long as possible, just short of the four years allowable in his case, Cohen argued.

She "respectfully" disagreed with the assessment by the Probation Department that 37 months, the low end of his sentencing guidelines, was appropriate, because he had complied with his bail restrictions, Cohen told Judge John Koeltl. "At most," she wrote, The Undertaker behaved because he knew he faced up to 20 years in prison for his crimes if he didn't.

And Cohen asked Koeltl to ignore the request for less than 37 months by his lawyer, noting that Balsamo had pleaded guilty even though attorney Gerald McMahon had stated his client was "totally innocent" and was going to demand "attorney's fees" following his acquittal during a totally disingenuous "media relations strategy" in remarks to the New York Post and Gang Land.

But the judge wasn't convinced.

He gave Balsamo, who is 52 years old, 34 months. That's the longest sentence of any of the four prison terms he meted out this week to Genovese soldiers who copped plea deals in the case. But it's still three months less than the low end of the guidelines, and a year less than what the feds wanted. Koeltl also ordered the wiseguy to forfeit $20,000.

Earlier yesterday, Koeltl heeded the call of attorney Michael Marinaccio for leniency, and gave wiseguy Michael Messina, whose guidelines were the same as Balsamo's, 18 months in prison, and put off his surrender date until January. Messina, 70, was ordered to forfeit $200,000 and like all four mobsters sentenced this week, was given three years of post-prison supervised release.

On Tuesday, mobster John Campanella, 48, received 13 months in prison, which is five months less than the low end of his sentencing guidelines. Capo Nicholas (Nicky Slash) Calisi, 64, got a 24 month-bid, three months less than his low end. He and Campanella were ordered to forfeit a total of $40,000. Like Balsamo, the duo were ordered to begin doing their time on September 29

[TommyGambino]

Wasn’t that picture of Barney and his guys on social media before Gangland? How is Capeci taking credit for it

[JohnnyS]

Wasn’t that picture of Barney and his guys on social media before Gangland? How is Capeci taking credit for it

It was actually eboli that posted on here first. Somebody should email Capeci.

Thanks for posting Dr.

[Tonyd621]

Ralph Balsamo has been arrested alot it seems.

[Hired_Goonz]

Thanks for posting. Am I understanding this correctly that Vinnie Mercedes flipped in 2014 but is presently on record as a Colombo associate?

[Little_Al1991]

Thanks for posting

[johnny_scootch]

Thanks for posting. Am I understanding this correctly that Vinnie Mercedes flipped in 2014 but is presently on record as a Colombo associate?

I'm reading it that way also but it obviously doesn't make sense. Maybe he was able to keep his cooperation somewhat of a secret and no one checked?

[aray22]

Thanks for posting. Am I understanding this correctly that Vinnie Mercedes flipped in 2014 but is presently on record as a Colombo associate?

Sounds like he squealed on his buddy. Not sure how much the Colombo's would've known about that considering he probably wasn't an associate then, only 22 years old.

"Meanwhile, Stewart opted not to go to trial and risk confronting Vinnie Mercedes, who told the feds that Stewart had conducted surveillance of Radio Shack employees and was the driving force behind all the robberies"

[Wiseguy]

How much money are you going to get from a Radio Shack?

[Hired_Goonz]

Thanks for posting. Am I understanding this correctly that Vinnie Mercedes flipped in 2014 but is presently on record as a Colombo associate?

Sounds like he squealed on his buddy. Not sure how much the Colombo's would've known about that considering he probably wasn't an associate then, only 22 years old.

"Meanwhile, Stewart opted not to go to trial and risk confronting Vinnie Mercedes, who told the feds that Stewart had conducted surveillance of Radio Shack employees and was the driving force behind all the robberies"

Yea I guess they just never knew about it since it was more of a crackhead crime spree than organized crime activity. But you would think that you would look into the background of a potential associate especially if he's the son of a rat. But this is the family who had a snitch as an acting boss.

[Wiseguy]

Ralph Balsamo has been arrested alot it seems.

I promised them and I promise this Court that I will use every day of my time incarcerated to better myself as a human being and to learn from this experience. Thank you. - Ralph Balsamo (2007)

[AntComello]

Ralph Balsamo has been arrested alot it seems.

I promised them and I promise this Court that I will use every day of my time incarcerated to better myself as a human being and to learn from this experience. Thank you. - Ralph Balsamo (2007)

Classic lol

[Southshore88]

Thanks for posting

[ATTHEBARBERSHOP]

Who was vinnie mercedes around ?? How was he an associate

[Little_Al1991]

Can someone please post this week’s GL?