Gangland February 1sr 2024

[Dr031718]

His Family Missed His Heroic Performance 20 Years Ago; But They Were There This Week When Goldie Got His Reward

The last time Duane (Goldie) Leisenheimer was there, his wife and twin sons were in an FBI safe house, and missed his anchorman role at the murder trial of Mafia Boss Joseph Massino. They got there this week though, and watched with tears of joy in their eyes and love in their hearts as the judge rewarded him for his heroism before and after he took the witness stand back in 2004.

"I was 20 years younger at the time and so were you," Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis told Leisenheimer as he gave him a no jail time sentence for his "selfless and heroic" acts, on the witness stand, and also a year earlier when Goldie pleaded guilty to taking part in a 1984 mob rubout and agreed to finger Massino for that murder and a slew of other crimes.

Out of concerns for Leisenheimer's safety, and for secrecy, the venue for Goldie's guilty plea in July of 2003, as Garaufis recalled on Tuesday, was at the nearby Marriott Hotel on Tillary Street. That day, according to court records, the Leisenheimer family moved out of their Middle Village, Queens home and began living under the protection of FBI agents.

By then, Leisenheimer, who had grown up in Maspeth and stolen his first car when he was 15, two years after he met and was befriended by Massino, had left the Life more than a dozen years earlier. He had gotten married, had two teenaged sons, and had turned his life around completely. But he was reminded about the old Life constantly, by investigators and wiseguy friends of Massino, as well as FBI agents, who had arrested the Bonanno boss six months earlier.

In the end, as Garaufis, who stepped down from the bench and shook Leisenheimer's hand at the end of the session, noted, Goldie, while undergoing great personal risks, played a "very important" role in the conviction of Massino, who later became a cooperating witness — the first Mafia boss to publicly break his vow of omerta.

On the witness stand, Leisenheimer testified that he didn't know it before hand, but he helped Massino, his brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale and a mobster he knew only as George (Gerlando Sciascia) plan the three capos murders of a trio of rival capos who were shot to death in a social club on 13th Avenue in Brooklyn in May of 1981, by obtaining the vehicles that were used in the caper.

He testified that three years later he knowingly allowed Massino and other mobsters use his garage for the execution murder in April of 1984 of mobster Cesare Bonventre, who was driven to his garage in Queens by a trio of wiseguys and shot and killed there by mobster Louis (Louie Haha) Attanasio.

A month ago, in a letter to Judge Garaufis, Leisenheimer recalled their meeting in the Marriott hotel and thanked him for the "rare opportunity" to receive a "new lease on life" when he pleaded guilty to crimes he'd committed. He specifically recalled his role in the Bonventure murder as a crime for which he "has so much remorse and so many regrets."

"That is something I can never forgive myself for," he wrote. "I have a 19-month old granddaughter, who is the world to me. I think, what if her daddy didn't come home. What if one of my sons never came home. I now have my second daughter-in-law, who is five months pregnant, and I still think of Cesare's wife 40 years later."

The same year he helped Massino and his crew kill Bonventre, Leisenheimer began an 18-month stretch behind bars, but not for a crime. It was for being a "standup guy" and not telling a grand jury about the 29 months that Massino had spent hiding out at Goldie's parents' home in Milford Pennsylvania when he was ducking a prosecution based on the undercover work of FBI agent Joe Pistone.

It was while Massino was hiding out in Pennsylvania that he ordered him to take part in the murder of Bonventre, Goldie testified back in 2004.

When Massino gave himself up and surrendered to face trial for the three capos murders in Manhattan Federal Court — he was acquitted in 1987 — Leisenheimer was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury and refused to testify about it.

"I was a stand-up guy back then," Leisenheimer testified.

But in June of 2003, when FBI agents Kim McCaffrey and Jeff Sallet knocked on his door and were looking to speak to him, his life had changed dramatically. In fact, he testified, it was Donna, whom he had married in 1989, who answered the door, and invited them into their home.

"They said to me, 'You know, you went to jail once for this guy. You don't need to go to jail again,'" said Leisenheimer. It took a few weeks for him to discuss it with his wife, and speak to a lawyer. But in the end, he agreed with the agents' reasoning, he agreed to cooperate, and he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in a makeshift courtroom in the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel.

"As I told Judge Garaufis," said Leiseheimer's lawyer, Gary Farrell, "He's a genuinely changed man. He's as good as it gets. He's a dedicated husband, father, and grandfather. This is not your typical (cooperation) case. Duane had turned his life around even before the FBI agents knocked on his door. He had a full time job, which he lost when he flipped."

And when the dust settled, and the case was over and done with," Farrell told Gang Land, Leisenheimer declined an offer for a new identity in the Witness Security Program. "He decided to move back to Queens and raise his family. Duane went out and got a new job, which he's had since then, and he's been an upstanding productive citizen, with no need for supervised release."

About 15 friends and relatives who wrote letters praising him, and who were in court to show their support for Duane Leisenheimer, heartily agree with Farrell. They included his wife, Donna, their sons Justin and Ian, their two daughters-in-law, a couple of Goldie's siblings — he has eight — his brother-in-law, and two ex-cops who've been long time friends.

"Duane is the guy who will drive the old lady on the block to the grocery store in order to help make sure he can carry her bags to her home when she is done," says his sister Jamee, a paralegal for 36 years who is nine years younger than Duane.

"He is the guy that sees the older gentleman struggling with a household project and will jump in to help," she wrote. "He is the man that will re-do the rooms in the house in order to make sure his granddaughter has a wonderful place to stay when she is in the care of her grandparents. He is the man that will put that same baby in her carriage and walk her around the park the minute he has come home from working after a 10-hour shift."

Leisenheimer, now 67, was the last of eight cooperating witnesses against Massino that prosecutors Robert Henoch, Mitra Hormozi, and Greg Andres called to the stand. "We decided to save our best witness for last," Gang Land recalls one of them saying a while later.

But a quick Gang Land investigation indicates that Leisenheimer isn't the last cooperator to be sentenced in the 20-year-old case. Turncoat Bonanno soldier Joseph D'Amico is still awaiting sentence.

Feds, Stevie Blue Duel Over Same Facts In The 'Smoking Gun Murder' Case

The 14-year-old lawsuit by Bonanno soldier Stephen (Stevie Blue) LoCurto to overturn his life sentence for an infamous gangland-style slaying has come down to a testy battle between federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and the gangster over the same set of facts.

And that's just the latest twist in this tortured legal fight over a shooting dubbed the "smoking gun murder" because cops found a still warm murder weapon in LoCurto's pocket minutes after the killing.

LoCurto's attorney says that testimony and other evidence produced at a hearing last fall proves that the mobster has now served 20 years for the 1986 killing of a rival gangster and should be released from prison.

In his final argument in the lawsuit, Seton Hall law professor Bernard Freamon, who is working pro bono as Stevie Blue's counsel, argues that the words of a federal prosecutor, combined with a ruling by a U.S. magistrate and very lousy legal work by his two trial lawyers back up LoCurto's claim that he would have accepted a 20-year plea deal if he'd known he faced a life sentence if he were convicted at trial.

Each side filed its legal brief Friday with U.S. Magistrate Sanket Bulsara. Freamon argued that the testimony by LoCurto and his trial lawyer plus hundreds of documents filed during Stevie Blue's 2006 trial and his lawsuit shows he would have taken a 20-year plea deal if he'd gotten correct legal advice.

Proscutors, who say LoCurto, 63, is trying to have it both ways, emphatically disagree. They say Stevie Blue, who was acquitted of the murder in a 1987 state court trial, had told both mob associates as well as his trial lawyer after his 2004 arrest that he would not plead guilty. He insisted he would testify in his own defense, and beat the case again since the only other person in the case was dead. They argue that even at the hearing held on the case in November, LoCurto, would not admit his guilt.

The feds cited this exchange from the lengthy hearing: "Is it your testimony that you would have plead(ed) guilty to a murder that in fact you didn't commit?" LoCurto was asked.
"Yes," he said.

In their brief, prosecutors summed up their interpretation of the testimony. "LoCurto's refusal to acknowledge his guilt, even at an evidentiary hearing conducted (nearly 20 years later) in order for him to establish that he would have accepted a guilty plea, is fatal to his claim," they wrote.

Prosecutors Andrew Roddin and Tanya Hajjar insisted that the evidence proved that no plea deal was offered and if one had been, LoCurto wouldn't have accepted it.

"Most significantly," they wrote, "LoCurto continues to maintain, as he did throughout the pretrial and trial proceedings in this case, that he is factually innocent of the charges against him."

The prosecutors also pointed to testimony at the hearing by LoCurto's trial lawyer, Harry Batchelder, who said that it was "pretty clear" from the outset of the case that LoCurto wanted to go to trial and was going to go to trial.

"One of the first things he ever said to me," Batchelder stated on the stand, "was don't try to talk me into getting a plea; we are going to trial."

Testimony by two turncoat mobsters at LoCurto's trial, they wrote, established that Stevie Blue "was going to fight his charges 'because the only person that was with him when it happened was dead.'" The deceased wiseguy was Gabe Infanti, a Bonanno soldier who traveled to Manhattan with LoCurto to kill victim Joseph Platia on May 9, 1986 and who was later murdered by the crime family, according to the mob defectors.

As for Stevie Blue's reliance on the opinion of appeals lawyer Laura Oppenheim, who was hired by Batchelder, and who opined that he faced a maximum of 20 years even if convicted at trial, the prosecutors wrote that "in LoCurto's presence, Batchelder disagreed" with her had told LoCurto, "It's my advice that if you go to trial and fail at trial, you are going to get life."

"Batchelder's account," countered Fraemon, LoCurto's court-appointed attorney, "does not have the ring of truth. There is no evidence, other than his testimony," the lawyer wrote, "that he disagreed with her advice" in the many letters that Batchelder wrote to Stevie Blue before and during his trial.

"Even if one were to believe Mr. Batchelder's assertions that he told (LoCurto) he would get a life sentence, his own testimony shows that he did nothing to contradict her advice," Freamon wrote. "He praised her in his testimony and there is every reason to believe that he praised her during the run-up to the trial," the attorney wrote. She was a "central figure" on the defense team and was listed "of counsel" on all the legal briefs that Batchelder submitted in the case, he wrote.

As LoCurto testified, the lawyer wrote, "if Batchelder had figuratively grabbed him by the shirt and told him that Oppenheim was wrong, he would have earnestly begun" seeking a 20-year-deal that was proposed by then-prosecutor Greg Andres in a November 2005 letter sent to Stevie Blue and 10 others charged in a monster racketeering case with rubouts ordered by Bonanno boss Joe Massino

Noting that his client, whom Bulsara "observed in open court," was not a "shrinking violet," Freamon argued that "if he knew that he had been given deficient advice about plea negotiations and his total sentencing exposure, he would have certainly demanded that the 20-year plea proposal be pursued," and accepted it once it was offered, as it was by nine other defendants.

Pointing to a 2016 filing by then-prosecutor Taryn Merkl stating that a plea deal "consistent with the terms" in the 2005 Andres letter was possible "had plea negotiations commenced" because "such a plea offer could have been drafted, approved by the required supervisors and ultimately extended" to LoCurto, Freamon argued that it should be offered to Stevie Blue now.

Both sides will submit their rebuttal arguments in March, again simultaneously.

Genovese Mobster's Role In Carpenters Union Was No Secret — But Ouster Took Decades

Thirty years after the New York District Council of Carpenters vowed to rid its ranks of mob influence, the powerful trade union has identified and ousted a longtime Genovese capo for maintaining a longtime and prominent role in the affairs of the union and the crime family.

In expelling mobster Thomas (Figgy) Ficarotta, investigators for the Carpenters Union said he had mob ties that go back to the early 1990s when Liborio (Barney) Bellomo, then the acting family boss, was in charge of doling out lucrative carpenters union jobs to Genovese wiseguys and associates at the Javits Center, Gang Land has learned.

According to info obtained by District Council investigator Robert Anton, "it's more than likely" that Ficarotta "had been tasked to oversee the Carpenter's Union" by Bellomo, who is referred to in the decision by the independent Hearing Officer as "Little Barney," a nickname for the crime family's official boss that is a new one to Gang Land which has been covering him for many years.

Despite those high-level mob connections, the 20,000-member District Council, which agreed in a 1994 consent decree with the feds to hire investigators and rid the nine carpenters union locals of any mob tied members, moved with snail-like speed to expel Ficarotta from Local 147, the largest local with about 11,000 members.

As far back as 1994, Figgy's affiliation with the Genovese crime family was noted by Kenneth McCabe, the late criminal investigator for the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office. At the time, McCabe said that Ficarotta was projected to earn $89,000 at the Javits Center that year, according to a Manhattan Federal Court filing in the case.

But it wasn't until September of last year that Ficarotta, 69, was expelled from Local 147 by Independent Hearing Officer Sharon McCarthy. Even then, the expulsion was kept under wraps until this month when the decision was made public in court filings. The ouster followed an uncontested hearing at which Ficarotta was charged with being a "long-time member" of the Genovese crime family who associated with other members of organized crime in violation of the Consent Decree.

The charges, brought by the union's Inspector General Richard Green, mirror allegations that Gang Land wrote about in 2015. Back then, Ficarotta was identified by the feds as a loanshark and a Genovese capo and rival of capo Daniel Pagano, but not charged, in a 2014 racketeering case in which the two capos allegedly used the same gangster, Michael (Mikey P) Palazzolo as an enforcer-collector.

Figgy, who has no arrests or convictions, opted not to fight the charges. Shortly before the hearing last fall, he submitted his resignation from Local 147. His attorney, Angelo Bisceglie, who has represented many union members and officials over the years, told McCarthy that his client's resignation had "negated" the District Council's jurisdiction over his client.

Informed that the District Council still had jurisdiction to expel Ficarotta from all contact with the union, its members, and in the future, Bisceglie sent an email stating: "My client and I will not be participating in this charade."

In information presented at the August 31 hearing came from an array of law enforcement sources, including the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office, the Rockland County District Attorney's office, and the Waterfront Commission. Green charged Figgy with ordering Palazzola to fly to Florida and collect a $36,000 loanshark debt that he was owed, along with his ties to both defendants, who each copped guilty pleas.

McCarthy's decision included an interesting bit of Gang Land fodder: It seems that up until March 5, 2018, the low key Ficarotta had never been spotted paying his final respects to a fallen wiseguy by any local or federal agencies who often cover them. But that day, NYPD detectives spotted Figgy at the well-attended lower East Side wake of Genovese street boss Peter (Petey Red) DiChiara.

"Law enforcement officials theorize," according to the expulsion decision, that Barney — Gang Land's having a tough time writing Little Barney — ordered Figgy and all family captains "to attend the wake." The theory is based on the fact that "this is the only known Genovese wake where law enforcement observed Ficarotta in attendance."

Bisceglie told Gang Land that the expulsion ruling was "nebulous. There is no impact on my client. He withdrew his membership, and he's on record saying he retired and has no intention of rejoining the carpenters union. He's merrily on his way, enjoying his pension."

The attorney wouldn't say how much he's getting, and neither would any of the District Council officials Gang Land spoke to, including Jill Watson, the Director of Communications.

Mike Zemski, a retired business agent for Local 2287 who often sparred with the union's top leadership, gave Gang Land a ballpark estimate, based on Ficarotta's 33 years as a member, at the Javits Center in the 1990s, and since then. "Between four and five thousand a month."

[Dr031718]

Thomas Ficarotta

[chin_gigante]

Would be worth trying to figure out who else attended DiChiara's wake, if law enforcement's theory is correct about the captains being instructed to attend.

[Southshore88]

Thanks for posting

[Tonyd621]

Jerry has a tough time typing "little Barney." As if he never makes mistakes or all the time he takes off known as "summer slides" or whatever the f*ck he calls it. Ease up, JC. Thank you Dr03...

[TSNYC]

Jerry also got the local wrong - it’s 157, not 147.

[JohnnyS]

Would be worth trying to figure out who else attended DiChiara's wake, if law enforcement's theory is correct about the captains being instructed to attend.

It would be a real who's who if we got a list of attendees to that wake. Not just from the Genovese family either I bet the other families had heavyweights including admin members there.

[AntComello]

Seems very un-Barney like to order ALL his capos to attend a wake.

[Cheech]

Jerry also got the local wrong - it’s 157, not 147.

He subsequently corrected it.

[Wiseguy]

What makes him a "rival" of Pagano?

[Cheech]

goes back to Mikey Pallazollo a Bronx debt collector who worked for Pagano and Figgy

[chin_gigante]

Seems very un-Barney like to order ALL his capos to attend a wake.

If correct, could potentially speak to how highly Bellomo thought of DiChiara if he was willing to break cover for it

[NorthBuffalo]

Is it the same Michael Pallazollo from this indictment? Sounds like a serious guy.

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-2n ... 68017.html

[Cheech]

same guy

[Ivan]

I hope I don't sound too harsh for saying this but I kinda hope Garaufis dies soon because I'm fucking sick of hearing about him. I mean we'll be subjected to a 10-paragraph obituary and then some remembrance thing at the end of the year but after that we'll be free.