Gangland May 16th 2024

[Dr031718]

'Peaches,' A 'Bandleader,' & 'Amica Nostra': Feds Say Cryptic Comments On Secret Tapes Link Jealous Ex-Hubby Tommy Manzo To Assault Of Boyfriend Of Ex-Wife Reality TV Star Dina Manzo

Nine years after New Jersey-based mobster John Perna and a cohort assaulted the boyfriend of Reality TV star Dina Manzo, the feds plan to play three sets of taped talks in an effort to prove that jealous ex-husband Thomas Manzo hired the mob to assault her new boyfriend, Gang Land has learned.

The tapes include an audio secretly recorded by state police which captured Perna's brother — a made member of the Luchese crime family — instructing the recently inducted Perna on the fine points of mob etiquette such as how to address a fellow wiseguy.

The tapes will play at Manzo's long-delayed racketeering trial which begins Monday in Newark Federal Court. In one set of tapes, jurors will hear Manzo tell an employee that Perna was a "mobster" who got a free wedding celebration that was attended by more than 250 friends, relatives and mobsters at Manzo's deluxe Brownstone Banquet Hall in Paterson a month after the assault in the summer of 2015, the feds say.

Prosecutors say a second set of recordings feature talks between Perna and his accomplice, including one about a mob-tied businessman known as "Peaches" who allegedly introduced Perna to Manzo. According to the feds, the introduction occurred as Manzo, who had split from his wife three years before, was deciding to get a tough guy to assault his ex-wife's boyfriend on July 18, 2015.

Jurors will also hear Luchese mobster Joseph Perna instruct his brother John about mob protocol minutes after his younger brother John followed in the footsteps of his older brother and their dad Ralph and was inducted into the New Jersey faction of the Luchese family, according to a ruling last week by Newark Federal Judge Susan Wigenton.

John Perna, 46, pleaded guilty in December 2020 to assaulting David Cantin at a Passaic County strip mall on July 18, 2015. He was released from prison last year after serving a 30-month prison term.

Manzo, 57, is charged with racketeering for aiding and abetting Lorenzo Tripodi, 46, a member of Perna's crew, to take part in the assault. Tripodi has since flipped and is expected to be the key government witness at the trial. The crime, according to the charges, consisted of encouraging Tripodi to commit a violent crime in aid of racketeering (VICAR), the assault of Cantin, in a bid to maintain or increase his position with the Luchese family.

Tripodi, a convicted drug dealer who is identified in the court filings as Associate #1, did so, the feds say, by carrying out Perna's order to assault Cantin. Manzo is also charged with obstruction of justice for turning over phony records about the wedding when they were subpoenaed by the feds in 2019.

Manzo and Perna were not indicted until June of 2020. But the FBI quickly tabbed Perna and Tripodi as suspects in the assault. It was captured on a surveillance video, and a witness also saw the duo flee the scene in Tripodi's car, according to government filings. Agents had pressed him to flip, he told Perna in an April 9, 2016 coded telephone call he received from the Luchese mobster, who began a 42 month state racketeering prison term shortly after his wedding.

During the conversation, prosecutors wrote, the duo referred to Manzo as the "Bandleader." Tripodi informed Perna, according to the excerpt the feds filed, that it was "odd" that the agents had told him that they knew that the link between them and Manzo "was an older gentleman, a fan of fruit," referring to Manzo's friend Patrick (Peaches) Pici, a Wayne N.J. businessman.

Perna: The Bandleader's friend?
Tripodi: Yeah.
Perna: Really?
Tripodi: Yeah.
Perna: Wow. That's interesting.

Perna remained concerned about his exposure for the assault but didn't find out until his arrest in 2020 that Tripodi was cooperating with the feds and had begun tape recording his conversations with Perna in 2019, when he was released from state prison.

Sources tell Gang Land that Tripodi, who was convicted of state drug charges in 2013 for distributing heroin in Essex County and was arrested twice by local police in 2016, for weapons charges and again for selling heroin, agreed to cooperate after the FBI used the info from the 2016 arrests to hit him with federal drug and weapons charges in February of 2017.

The sources declined to provide any specifics about his cooperation deal. But the court filings in his case indicate that Tripodi agreed to cooperate after three weeks behind bars, when then assistant U.S. attorney Grady O'Malley agreed to his release on a personal recognizance bond.

The gangster has moved, and for a while worked as a landscaper. Since 2019 when he began tape recording talks with Perna, according to filings in his case, he has been free to seek employment in New York, New Jersy and Pennsylvania.

While Tripodi was wired up against Perna, a worker at the Brownstone catering hall whom Manzo instructed to testify falsely before a grand jury investigating the assault, was tape recording talks with Manzo, the prosecutors wrote. The worker allegedly got his former boss to implicate himself in trying to coverup the fact that as payment for the assault, he gave Perna a free wedding reception that was attended by 272 guests, including Tripodi, and the family's acting boss, Matthew Madonna.

In snippets of one 2019 conversation that prosecutors Kendall Randolph, Thomas Kearney and Bruce Keller filed with Wigenton, Manzo told his employee that "Johnny" Perna "never paid" anything for the wedding celebration that was held on August 16, 2015.

"Look, this guy's a mobster," Manzo told his employee, noting that Perna "went to jail" shortly after he was married and "he was gonna come back and pay" when he was released, but didn't even though he had been released after serving a 42-month sentence for a New Jersey state racketeering conviction.

The Employee: He didn’t pay at all?
Manzo: No. There’s nothing illegal about that.

Prosecutors disagree. They have stated that it was illegal because "Manzo offered a lavish wedding at the Brownstone to Perna as compensation" in return for his agreement "to do the dirty work" for Manzo and assault Cantin, who married Dina three years later.

The prosecutors will use former New Jersey Police Lieutenant Brian Bruton, who was part of the state racketeering case that led to the prison term that Perna began right after his wedding and who witnessed a 2006 Christmas party that Peaches Pici booked for the Luchese family, to explain his ties to the mob that "led to Pici connecting Manzo to Perna" for the Cantin assault.

"Bruton also will testify that he conducted surveillance of Perna's" induction into the crime family in 2007 and will introduce the tape recording that a "Car Bug Recording captured directly after that ceremony."

"On the recording," the prosecutors wrote, "Immediately after John Perna's 'making' — or induction — ceremony at his brother Joseph's house in Toms River, NJ, Joseph educates his brother, John, on certain rules of the Enterprise, including how to address other members appropriately now that he had been officially 'made.'"

"When you introduce somebody," said Joseph, "let's say you are introducing me to somebody with, let's say, the Gambinos. You'll say, 'This is Joey Perna, Amica Nostra, Luchese. This is Joe Blow, Amica Nostra, Gambino.'"

No matter what the jury says at the end of the case, Manzo faces trial in Monmouth County Superior Court for orchestrating a 2017 home-invasion robbery and assault of Cantin and Dina in the couple's Holmdel NJ home by a longtime family associate named James (Jimmy Balls) Mainello.

Little Anthony Follows The Lead Of Carmine Pizza

A month after their Genovese family partners in the "lucrative illegal gambling operation" they ran for 10 years at the Gran Caffe Gelateria in Lynbrook copped guilty pleas to resolve their racketeering charges, the Bonanno family wiseguys in their joint venture have agreed to follow suit, Gang Land has learned.

Capo Anthony (Little Anthony) Pipitone, who headed the Bonanno family end of the caper, which "typically earned over $10,000 a week," his mobster brother Vito, and mob associate Agostino Gabriele all agreed to plead guilty to resolve the two year old case during a status conference last week in Brooklyn Federal Court.

The prospective plea deals in the Bonanno family end of the case have not been finalized but sources say they will be "similar" to the plea agreements that the feds worked out with lawyers for the Genovese gangsters, with the major wiseguy members in the scheme facing up to "a couple of years" and the mob associate facing up to six months.

Based on the 37 months high end of the sentencing guidelines in the plea agreement that acting Genovese capo Carmelo (Carmine Pizza) Polito received from the government, it's likely that number will be lower, up to 30 months, for Little Anthoney Pipitone, 51, and that the high end for Vito, 42, a tad lower still, at 24 months. Gabriele, 37, will likely face up to six months.

Dates when the defendants will plead guilty have not yet been scheduled.

Codefendant Hector Rosario, a Nassau County Police Department detective who was accused of selling his shield to the Bonanno crime family, to the detriment of the Genovese crime family by using "his position as a police detective to raid competing gambling businesses" in exchange for cash, still maintains his innocence of the two specific charges against him.

Rosario, who was fired following his arrest, is scheduled for trial before Brooklyn Federal Judge Eric Vitaliano on February 24.

Rosario, 51, is charged with obstructing a federal grand jury in Brooklyn and for lying to the FBI in January 2020 when he denied knowing a "member of the Bonanno crime family." He also lied, the feds say, when he stated he did not know that Genovese associate Salvatore (Sal the Shoemaker) Rubino ran an illegal gambling operation in Merrick at his now-closed place of business, Sal's Shoe's Repair.

During that interview, prosecutors allege that he "made materially false statements" to FBI agents by "denying any knowledge of Sal's Shoe Repair" when in fact, he not only knew about it, but had agreed to raid Rubino's gambling business for the Bonannos.

Judge OKs Ex-FBI Agent as Expert Witness, But Feds Decide Not to Use Him At Trial

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey won judicial approval to use former FBI agent Theodore Otto as an expert witness about the mob in their case against Tommy Manzo — but soon thought better of it.

The reason not to put the veteran agent on the stand hasn't been spelled out by the feds. But the problem stems from Otto's role in a controversial mob murder indictment of a gangster in Manhattan federal court, a case that was later dropped after prosecutors there deemed it faulty, Gang Land has learned.

The decision by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office not to prosecute its murder indictment of Gambino family associate Daniel Fama in 2014 never came up in the court filings or the oral arguments about the government's plan to use Otto as an expert, which was approved by Newark Federal Judge Susan Wigenton in her one sentence ruling on May 2.

But law enforcement sources tell Gang Land that the Garden State prosecutors grew wary of using Otto as a witness in light of the unprecedented decision by then U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to seek permission from a federal judge to dismiss a federal murder indictment that it had filed a year earlier.

As Gang Land wrote in 2014, the decision by Bharara to file a bare bones nolle prosequi — the official legal form that prosecutors must file when it decides not to go forward with a case — was roundly criticized by the judge who signed the form and dismissed the murder charge against Fama.

"What does that tell me?" said Judge John Keenan, after he took a few minutes to read the nolle prosequi document stating only that the dismissal motion was "in the interests of justice."

"What does that mean?" pressed Keenan. "You don't have any facts that you want to give me?" said the clearly peeved judge. Keenan noted that he had detained Fama without bail for eight months based on assurances that prosecutors had the goods on the mob associate for a 1990 murder that was ordered by John Gotti.

Fama's attorney, the late Charles Carnesi, accused Otto of "abusing his authority" and creating a "bogus prosecution" that wasn't "brought to go to trial" but in the hope of getting Fama to agree to cooperate. Carnesi called for "an investigation into the entire case by an independent federal prosecutor," but that request fell on deaf ears.

Otto, who was the case agent in the 2017 racketeering case that ended with the convictions of four Luchese gangsters, including acting boss Matthew Madonna and underboss Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea, for the 2013 gangland-style slaying of former Purple Gang leader Michael Meldish, retired in 2020, after 33 years as a G-Man. He could not be reached by Gang Land.

In their letter seeking Otto's testimony as a Mafia expert, prosecutors cited his participation in "arrests, indictments, and convictions" of mobsters in all five families as well as insight he's gleaned from interviews with cooperating witnesses "including acting bosses, captains, and consiglieres."

His testimony would have included, the prosecutors wrote, the "overall structure" and the "habits and practices" of all Cosa Nostra members and associates with a "particular" focus on the Luchese family's "interactions in the communities in which they operate, including with legitimate and illegitimate business entities and criminal and law-abiding citizenry."

Noting that Manzo was "an ostensibly legitimate businessman," the prosecutors wrote that Otto's expert testimony "will help the jury understand" how and why Manzo, "someone with supposedly 'profound' reasons to never even 'associate with the Mafia,' would turn to it for help in threatening, or in this case committing, a violent crime."

Since Judge Wigenton agreed that was a proper use of expert testimony, it remains to be seen whether prosecutors will seek to call another expert witness, or use one of the prosecution team's two FBI case agents as an expert, or have retired police lieutenant Bruton, who is slated to testify about the activities of the Luchese family's New Jersey-based faction, fill that void.

Perhaps they'll leave it to the common sense of the jury to figure out for themselves, based on the evidence that they see and hear during the trial, whether Manzo is guilty or innocent of giving Perna a free wedding reception in return for assaulting his ex-wife's lover, and of obstructing justice in the FBI's investigation of the 2015 assault of David Cantin

[Tonyd621]

Thank for posting. A "couple of years" for gambling charges is ridiculous. They shouldn't even get a jail time. Everybody who bets with them is a willing participant and can go the legal route.

[Southshore88]

Thanks for posting. Pretty interesting note that the detective still hasn't plead to anything yet

[UTC]

Thank for posting. A "couple of years" for gambling charges is ridiculous. They shouldn't even get a jail time. Everybody who bets with them is a willing participant and can go the legal route.

Agreed. Totally ludicrous. And racist. The odds that a minority would get that, regardless of past record, are zero.

[NorthBuffalo]

Thank for posting. A "couple of years" for gambling charges is ridiculous. They shouldn't even get a jail time. Everybody who bets with them is a willing participant and can go the legal route.

Agreed. Totally ludicrous. And racist. The odds that a minority would get that, regardless of past record, are zero.

Exceptionally racist - if they were orange, they could do TV interviews calling the judge and his kids corrupt - or get their bonds reduced by bitching that its 'unfair'

[johnny_scootch]

NorthBuffalos comment makes me think of that loser TallGuy who hates Trump but has him on his mind 24/7 and can't help but bring him up any chance he gets even when he has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. Glad that guy doesn't post anymore he really enjoyed stirring up shit.

If Trump wins cases of TDS are going to skyrocket and for those who already have it it could become fatal.

[Pogo The Clown]

It’s a Solar eclipse.


Pogo

[Tonyd621]

Ted Otto is an expert because he arrested alot of Italian oc members and got people to flip? I feel like there has to be some academic criteria to be called an "expert" of anything imo.