Gangland May 23rd 2024

[Dr031718]

Bazoo Allegedly Acted Like A Maniac In Loansharking Case Against A Codefendant

Bonanno mobster John (Bazoo) Ragano broke new ground when he pleaded guilty to federal loansharking charges involving a victim who was a defendant in the same case, the blockbuster indictment that charged the hierarchy of the Colombo crime family with shaking down a Queens-based construction workers union for 20 years, Gang Land has learned.

It wasn't that Ragano had committed a crime against a codefendant. That's happened more than a few times, too many to mention. Bazoo allegedly continued to commit the crime for eight months after pleading guilty to committing the crime, according to court filings by his attorneys, who have asked the judge to dismiss the case.

Ragano, who pleaded guilty to using extortionate means to collect weekly interest payments of $2250 on a $150,000 "juice" loan from Vincent Martino in November of 2022, is charged with continuing to try to extort money from Martino, until July 5, 2023, a few days before Bazoo was about to begin the 57-month prison term he received. On that day, Martino tape recorded Ragano as he allegedly threatened Martino to pay up or else.

But Bazoo's lawyers, who noted that the feds had also given their client a second mob nickname, "Maniac" when he was indicted in September of 2021, argue that the feds, knowing he was "somewhat volatile," had conjured up a "deliberate, preconceived strategy to provoke" him by getting Martino to "falsely accuse" Ragano of tape-recording him.

He may have acted like a maniac, but Bazoo's angry outburst had nothing to do with collecting a loanshark debt, say lawyers Joel Stein and Ken Womble. It was "the defendant's angry retort to (Martino's) provocative false accusation" that Ragano was a cooperating witness for the government, the lawyers argued in asking Brooklyn Federal Judge Hector Gozalez to dismiss the indictment.

"Since the defendant was, according to the government, reputed to be a member of an organized crime family, this was a serious accusation made in an area open to the public and with other employees also present, and not to be taken lightly," the lawyers wrote. They noted that Martino had burst into the salvage yard unannounced where Bazoo had been working since he was granted bail.

The Bonanno wiseguy was indicted on fraud, drug dealing, and loansharking charges in September of 2021 along with Martino and 12 members and associates of the Colombo family, including its late boss, Andrew (Mush) Russo, who were accused of various crimes stemming from the government's investigation into the long-running union shakedown. All of the defendants, with the exception of Russo, copped guilty pleas.

"This provocative accusation into which (Martino) launched immediately after entering the defendant's office precipitated a verbal confrontation" and "a fusillade of bombastic statements including a suggestion that each should undress to prove that neither was recording the other," the lawyers wrote. Martino is not named in the filing but referred to as "CW," for cooperating witness.

The lawyers do not state whether or not Ragano, 62, and Martino, 45, took their clothes off, but if they did, Bazoo failed to discover the recording device that was used to tape record this angry retort:

"Listen to me buddy, listen to me. You can do whatever you want. I'm gon[n]a just tell you one thing, you do whatever you want, but I'm gon[n]a be honest with you. When I get out? You put a fucking wire on me, I'm gon[n]a come out, and I'm gon[n]a show you what kinda guy I am."

"Notably," the lawyers continued, "the exchanges were not because of any outstanding debt. Rather, they were the result of (Martino's) confrontational false accusations which produced a stream of invectives."

They argued that when taken in context, the "two eventual references to 'money' by the defendant (were) merely incidental and an afterthought to CW's provocations concerning the false accusation of the defendant's alleged 'cooperation' (that) did not occur until approximately one minute into a conversation that lasted about two minutes and 15 seconds, and not until after CW's false accusations inflamed the conversation."

Stein and Womble wrote that the feds believed that their "strategy to incite the defendant into an admission" had succeeded and that his "references to money" were a "gotcha" moment. They argued, however, that the feds had "cherry picked from the other information" to indict Ragano on loansharking and obstruction of justice charges that were "not probative."

The lawyers note that during the eight months from November 2022 through July of 2023, Ragano is heard on only three of the 25 tape recorded conversations involving Martino that the government has turned over to the defense and that there is no "reference to money, a debt, a loan, or collection of a loan or debt" in the other two talks involving Bazoo.

They also argue that evidence the government has turned over indicates that his client did not tender a usurious loan to Martino or use threats to try and collect it.

"While there are conversations" between Martino and an alleged "unindicted co-conspirator" whom the lawyers identify as CC-1, discussing "the loan," the lawyers wrote that in one of the conversations CC-1 indicated it was a non-usurious or "no juice" loan and that "extortionate means" were not going to be used to collect it.

"Bro, what are you worried about?" CC-1 told Martino on June 30, 2023, according to the excerpt filed by the lawyers. "I don't understand it, I'm not understanding it, what are you worried about? It's a fucking loan, you're paying the loan back, there's no fucking juice on it. I don't understand what you're worried about."

Five days later, after failing to get the goods on Ragano for "at least six futile months or more," the FBI and federal prosecutors were "desperate to induce an admission" of guilty from Bazoo before he left to serve his prison term, the lawyers wrote. They then sent a wired-up Martino into Ragano's office "to bolster an investigation otherwise lacking evidence" against their client, the lawyers stated.

"Prior to July 5," wrote lawyers Stein and Womble, "there had been no 'there' there" because "the "defendant had not been recorded making any reference to a loan, debt or 'money.'"

But on July 5, they wrote, the government had "achieved its goal of finally eliciting an admission" from Bazoo and essentially ended its investigation that led to Ragano's indictment, that is slated for trial on October 7.

That may not happen. At a status conference Tuesday, prosecutor Devon Lash and Ragano's lawyers informed Judge Gonzalez that the government has offered Bazoo a plea offer that he is considering.

Nancy Bartling, the attorney for Martino, the Ragano codefendant who copped a plea deal to drug dealing charges calling for 37-to-46 months behind bars and who is currently slated to be sentenced in October, declined to comment. But Martino's efforts as a CW against Ragano will likely reduce that substantially, if not entirely, when he faces the music.

Ragano's lawyers, as well as Lash, whose response to the defense dismissal motion is due next month, and the spokesman for the Brooklyn U.S. attorney's office, also declined to comment about the case.

Lawyer For Colombo Hitman Whose Credo Is 'Death Before Dishonor,' Was A Government Snitch

The noted appeals lawyer who represents convicted mob hitman John Pappa in his longshot motion for an early prison release was a kindred spirit who spent a decade behind bars before becoming an attorney. But Shon Hopwood was also a cooperating witness who had violated the "Death before dishonor" credo that his client has tattooed in Italian on his back, Gang Land has learned.

Hopwood became an ace jailhouse lawyer, authoring two winning appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court while in federal prison for bank robbery. He earned a reduced 11-year sentence for testifying against the cohort who had provided the guns and stolen cars he had used in his bank jobs, earning a law degree after his release.

That's according to Hopwood, who wrote in his 2012 book, Law Man, that he "had cooperated with the government" because he'd been told that with a cooperation deal, he "would serve 12 to 15 years" behind bars, but that "without it (he would likely spend) 85-to-95" years in prison for five 1997 bank robberies that had grossed him $200,000.

In Law Man, which he wrote while attending the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, Hopwood stated that he was in constant fear that someone would find out about his role as a snitch during the years he spent in Pekin, the medium level federal prison in central Illinois where he served all his time until his release in 2009.

His "main concern," he wrote, was Tyler, "the guy who had sold us dope and guns and stolen cars" and been charged as "an accessory" in his bank jobs. Hopwood wrote that he tried to convince Tyler to plead guilty because the feds had "more than enough proof establishing Tyler's guilt" even though "he had never robbed a bank" with Hopwood.

He'd been introduced to Tyler in 1997, "a medium level drug dealer and part time college student" who "sold drugs and could provide whatever a bad guy needed" after he'd gotten out of the Navy, and while he was living "in the basement" of his parents' home in David City, Nebraska.

He had pleaded with Tyler, not his real name, to reconsider, writing that Tyler "was playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded." But Tyler refused and he "walked past the holding cell" where Hopwood had been confined on his first day of trial "with vengeance in his eyes," Hopwood wrote.

As he languished in Pekin, his "paranoia grew more intense" that Tyler would be transferred to Pekin, Hopwood wrote. That was fueled, he wrote, by an inmate he called "Bee," who "talked about what they did to snitches in his old gang." Bee "would look at me like he knew everything about me," and once gave him "a speech" on why snitches were "such a big issue," he wrote.

"Shon," Bee said, "you know about Dante's Inferno? Do you know what Dante said was the lowest circle of hell? The deepest region of hell, level nine, is reserved for the sin of betrayal," he continued. "I mean, like killing someone is only seven. Dishonesty is eight. But betrayal, in this world and the next, that's the pit bud. That's it."

Hopwood wrote that when he "later learned more about the law," he realized that Bee, who had a "lengthy criminal history" was a hypocrite like many inmates, who would always badmouth snitches but were often informers themselves.

Bee, Hopwood wrote, "could not possibly have received such a lenient sentence without some sort of help from the prosecution. Either that or his mama knew the judge," he cracked.

Hopwood, 48, is currently preparing for his June 3 trial in D.C. Superior Court where he is charged with beating his wife, Ann Marie, also a lawyer and a partner in the Washington D.C. firm of Hopwood & Singhal. The abuse allegedly took place four times at their D.C. home between October of 2022 and September of last year. His wife was twice treated for her injuries at a local hospital, according to an arrest complaint in the case.

Hopwood, a law professor at Georgetown Law School since 2017, is currently on leave from the school. He is barred from entering the street where his wife lives with their two children, and from speaking to his two children, who are government witnesses in the case, about "the pending criminal case" against him, according to a "stay away/no contact" order of protection in the case.

As for Pappa, assistant U.S. attorney Raffaela Belizaire has filed a sealed "law enforcement" letter to Brooklyn Federal Judge Pamela Chen, most likely pressing the government's request, and that of the relatives of two of the four persons Pappa killed as a teenaged Colombo family hitman in 1993 and 1994, that the judge deny a compassionate release to the 49-year-old inmate.

After Three Years Behind Bars, Michael Michael Is Almost All The Way Home

The feds have so far failed to prove that Mileta (Michael Michael) Miljanic was ever the leader of a violent Serbian-American gang or a partner of the Gambino family in a slew of racketeering crimes in the construction industry, as they alleged in court filings. Despite that, they managed to keep him behind bars on substantial fraud charges — until recently.

His custody with the federal Bureau of Prisons for defrauding the IRS and the Small Business Administration of $875,000 from 2018 to 2020 doesn't end officially for another month. But ten weeks ago, the BOP placed Miljanic, 64, into a halfway house, an indication that the racketeering charges the feds began eyeing four years ago, are a dead issue.

Since March 13, 2020, when a wired-up plumbing contractor tape recorded the former president of the NY State Building & Construction Trades Council James Cahill claiming that Miljanic and Gambino capo Louis (Bo) Filippelli were partners in construction industry rackets, the feds had targeted them as racketeers they would try to nail on racketeering charges.

That's when federal prosecutors in Manhattan heard Cahill state that Filippelli and Miljanic had become fast friends when he got the mobster "to intervene" with the reputed leader of Grupo Amerika to block "a death threat" against a Cahill nephew by the Serbian-American gang that the feds say Miljanic heads.

"So what does Louis do?" Cahill said. "He goes partners with Michael Michael in the construction business, and they're happy as pigs in shit."

Miljanic was jailed without bail in February of 2021 when federal investigators, searching for documents that would link Michael Michael to construction industry rackets, spotted a loaded handgun on his night stand during a search of his Queens apartment. Brooklyn federal prosecutors hit him with federal weapons charges and detained him.

To keep him behind bars on the Brooklyn gun charges, as well as the tax evasion and SBA loan fraud charges the feds filed in Manhattan 15 months later, they argued that Michael Michael was a risk to flee to his native Serbia to escape possible charges of money laundering, bribery, and wire fraud "with the Gambino crime family's involvement in the construction industry."

In a May, 2022 arrest complaint, the feds alleged that Michael Michael's company, MDP Rebar Solutions, did no work but was a "shell company" that was used to funnel "millions of dollars to members and associates of organized crime," including Gambino consigliere Lorenzo Maninno and a handful of family wiseguys, associates, and their relatives.

When push came to shove, however, those allegations, at least so far, were empty words without any hard evidence to back them up.

But lawyers for Miljanic submitted evidence indicating that MDP Rebar Solutions had been an active contractor. From March of 2020 until February of 2022, according to documents and pictures filed by defense attorney Joseph Corozzo, MDP Rebar worked on five major NYC building projects. The company earned so much dough, in fact, that Michael Michael had to admit he evaded $621,700 in taxes he should have paid to Uncle Sam in 2018 and 2019.

[Shellackhead]

Thanks for posting

[Dave65827]

Looks like Vincent Martino is the second guy to turn cooperating witness from the Colombo case after Ferrera

Dropping like flies