Gangland August 22nd 2024

[Dr031718]

Secret Colombo Family Snitch Seeks No-Jail Sentence For Racketeering Rap

Mob capo Richard Ferrara, who sources say is the first Colombo crime family mobster to violate his oath of omerta and join Team America in more than a decade, is asking a judge not to send him to prison at his sentencing next week for his role in the shakedown of a union official. But Ferrara makes no mention in his legal papers that he has been a cooperating witness, Gang Land has learned.

Instead, Ferrara's lawyer argues in court filings that unlike his 13 codefendants, who include a Bonanno soldier and five Colombo mobsters, including the crime family's then underboss Benjamin (The Claw) Castellazzo, and consigliere, Ralph (Big Ralph) DeMatteo, Ferrara is a "successful businessman" whose "wealth was not obtained through illegal activities."

The attorney also asserted that Ferrara had a "limited" role in the union extortion, providing only " minimal advice." Ferrara also claims to have also "told the group not to use violence or threats — advice which was ignored — and specifically stated that he did not want any proceeds from the scheme."

"He achieved financial success through hard work and careful investing," his lawyer told Brooklyn Federal Judge Hector Gonzalez. "He owns two shopping centers in New Jersey and runs a very successful contracting business. As a contractor, for instance, he is presently building restaurants and fitting them out for a successful restaurant chain."

"To repeat," attorney David Kirby stressed in his sentencing memo, "there is no suggestion in this case that any of his wealth derived from criminal activities."

Ferrara, 62, was charged with racketeering and with supervising the activities of the Colombo capo who had orchestrated the extortion scheme. He was arrested in September 2021 and detained as a dangerous felon after FBI agents found a semiautomatic pistol with a defaced serial number, and two other guns during a search of his home.

At the time, prosecutors alleged that Ferrara had attended a November 2020 restaurant meeting when the family hierarchy "decided" that Andrew (Mush) Russo would serve as the family boss until he was succeeded by capo Theodore (Skinny Teddy) Persico, the nephew of the late leader Carmine (Junior) Persico.

Four months after his arrest, Ferrara was released on a $10 million bond secured by $12.3 million in property, which included three shopping centers on the Jersey Shore that Ferrara owned with his brother Theodore, who co-signed the $10 Million bond along with Ferrara's wife and two sons.

Ferrara got involved "in the union embezzlement scheme" in "the last six months of its existence," Kirby wrote in his filing with Gonzalez. "His limited role," the lawyer argued, "in light of the extent of the scheme is worthy of a significant departure or variance" below the 46-to-57 month recommended sentence in his plea agreement.

Kirby made similar arguments in complaints about the Pre-Sentence Report for Gonzalez that was prepared by the Probation Department. He wrote that the PSR wrongly states that Ferrara "intended to launder" funds received from the the union extortion, insisting that his client never earned any money from the scheme.

"Contrary to the information in the PSR," Kirby wrote, his client "worked at the Meat and Food Warehouse" in Manhattan and "was employed at all times" since his January of 2022 release from the Metropolitan Detention Center, where his incarceration "was particularly difficult."

In addition to "the usual horrors of MDC," the lawyer told Gonzalez, Ferrara, who "suffers from a number of health issues" contracted the COVID virus while there and also "had angina attacks for which MDC failed to provide nitroglycerine."

"It would be substantially detrimental to Mr. Ferrara's health to be incarcerated" again, Kirby wrote, noting that his client suffers from "left ventricle hypertrophy, high blood pressure, arterial plaque, severe sleep apnea, thoracic spinal pain and sciatic spinal pain."

Ferrara also "has an umbilical hernia, which requires surgery," Kirby wrote, and his "doctor suspects" that he "may be diabetic." Ferrara also "has prostate issues which are being treated by medication, and his PSA levels are elevated which may indicate incipient cancer," the lawyer wrote. Kirby promised to submit even more "medical records" about his client's ailments in a "separate sealed" filing to back up the request.

It's hard to imagine what additional information Kirby might have about Ferrara's health that would warrant sealing in light of all the ailments that the lawyer has publicly filed.

In the letter, the lawyer asked the judge to impose a "non-incarcerative sentence" but stated that Ferrara recognizes that "the Court may require" him "to serve some time in detention." In that case, Kirby asked that any sentence be served at home.

But the biggest news of Ferrara's post-arrest life is unmentioned: Nowhere in his filings does Kirby mention that in December of 2022, when Ferrara pleaded guilty with a plea agreement calling for a recommended prison term of 46-to-57 months, sources say the wiseguy had already agreed to wear a wire for the FBI and was helping prosecutors make cases against two so-called Russian gangsters by tape-recording conversations that implicated them in criminal activity.

In emails and a telephone discussion with Kirby in April of last year, when Gang Land first reported that Ferrara was cooperating, the lawyer stated we had it wrong. He said his client's bail restrictions had been modified several times to enable him to leave his Brooklyn home and travel to Florida for "doctor's appointments" with heart specialists and "to rebuild his home" that had been damaged in Hurricane Ian, as he had stated in court filings.

"You have to be very careful about that," said Kirby, noting that "people's lives are in jeopardy if (the assertion that Ferrara is cooperating) is true, or even if it's not true."

The two defendants, Dimitri Bediner, 59, and Dmitri Prus, 46, each pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about the 2009 death in a Sheepshead Bay bar of a Russian immigrant named Ildar Gazizouline, whose body was buried in a wooded area in Sullivan County. His skeletal remains were identified in 2012, but the investigation into his death went nowhere, sources say, until Ferrara taped talks with several Russian gangsters he'd had dealings with back then.

Prosecutors are slated to file their sentencing memo today.

Feds: Armed Salvage Yard Workers Terrorized A Buck Naked Loanshark Victim As Bazoo Threatened Him

The entire scenario when mobster John (Bazoo) Ragano threatened an alleged loanshark victim, including the fear and terror that the buck naked man felt and expressed about the confrontation when two salvage yard workers showed up brandishing metal tools, is important evidence that prosecutors plan to use at the Bonanno soldier's upcoming trial, Gang Land has learned.

The men "walked up behind Ragano" as the wiseguy "demanded that (Vincent Martino) remove all of his clothes" and remained there as Bazoo "made explicitly clear that" if Martino "did not pay" him the "fucking money" he owed him Ragano would "slap the shit out of" him when he got out of prison, the prosecutors stated in a court filing.

"Approximately 40 seconds after (he) fled from the garage," the prosecutors wrote, Martino called an FBI agent and excitedly told him that "his guys started coming at me. They — two guys in the back with a fuckin' tire iron. So I uh, I uh, I uh, ran out of there." The call was also captured on the same recording device that picked up Bazoo's alleged threats against Martino.

Martino's testimony and the tape-recorded account "of the two men who appeared during Ragano's confrontation" with him "is plainly relevant to proving the extortionate collection scheme," wrote prosecutors Devon Lash and Andrew Reich.

"Predictably and by design," the prosecutors wrote, "when Ragano began loudly threatening" Martino, the workers "stepped in to support Ragano" in a "location where Ragano knew the two would be out of view of the public."

"As a result," they wrote, Martino "felt the fear of being threatened and outnumbered, naked and exposed in a nonpublic garage." They noted that the "scenario goes to the heart" of what they must prove at trial, namely that Bazoo used threats, "whether implicit or otherwise," to collect the loan and "the predictable effect" they had on Martino.

They asked Gonzalez to reject Ragano's motion to preclude any testimony about the two workers who showed up as well as any testimony or tape recordings containing Martino's remarks "to FBI agents immediately following the incident" about the presence of the salvage yard workers.

Bazoo's lawyers contend that the presence of the workers was irrelevant since they never uttered any threats. They argued that since Martino created the angry confrontation by falsely accusing Ragano to obtain an angry tape-recorded retort by their excitable client, the predictable outburst should be precluded.

The "circumstances surrounding" the recording "have no bearing at all on Ragano's conduct," or his threats against Martino, or "making him strip naked," the prosecutors wrote. And they have no "bearing on the unexpected approach of the two men holding metal tools," they wrote.

"None of these events could have been predicted," the prosectors wrote, "and, even if they could have been, that would not have made them any less stressful or exciting to (Martino.")

They counter that the mere presence of the two workers holding metal tools lends credibility to their theory that Ragano made violent threats to Martino during the encounter. They argued that Bazoo's lawyers were free to "present an innocent, non-threatening explanation" to the jury if they wish.

Martino's statements to the FBI about the "events in the garage were objectively startling" and included Bazoo's "violent threats and demands that (Martino) strip naked, and the unexpected approach of the two men holding metal tools," the prosecutors wrote. This was important, relevant evidence of Ragano's guilt, they arote.

"The statements," they wrote, "were made less than one minute after he fled the shop scrambling to dress himself" and "undoubtedly while he was still under the stress of the excitement caused by those events." During the brief call, they noted, Martino "immediately began relaying what had happened and can be heard stuttering and cursing."

In a retort to a motion by Ragano's lawyers to block the feds from using taped talks of Bazoo espousing violence to turncoat mob associate Andrew Koslosky, prosecutors Lash and Reich stated in a court filing that had told attorney Joel Stein, who has represented Ragano since 2021 and has had copies of the Koslosky tapes since then, that they were planning to use them at trial.

They wrote that they even asked Stein if he needed copies of the tapes and he told them he didn't.

Stein and his co-counsel had asked Gonzalez to block the prosecutors from using the tapes because they first stated in a written document that they were going to use them in a July pre-trial filing with the Court, more than five months after the judge had directed them to alert the defense about the evidence they planned to use at tiral.

The prosecutors did not dispute that, but essentially argued that the defense claim was much ado about nothing, and should be rejected. Ragano has not been prejudiced in any way, they argued, since the defense has had official notice of the four tape recorded snippets the government plans to play since July, and trial doesn't begin until October 7.

Vinny Unions Wins A Compassionate Release, Too Late For It To Matter

Back in 2021, Colombo capo Vincent (Vinny Unions) Ricciardo boldly cited his chronic heart disease as a reason why he was "not afraid to go to jail" for threatening to shoot an extortion victim. In February, however, he said his heart problems were a reason he should be allowed to serve his sentence for that crime at home. The judge disagreed, sending him off to prison. Then, last week, Vinny Unions got what he asked for: a compassionate release to go home. He never made it. Ricciardo died on Saturday while still behind bars, Gang Land has learned.

The decision to let Ricciardo leave prison was made by Brooklyn Federal Judge Hector Gonzalez, the same man who had rejected a request for home detention when he faced the music for racketeering in February. Last Friday, the judge reversed himself, granting the ailing mobster's unopposed motion for compassion, based on the "significant deterioration of his health since the date of his sentencing."

Gonzalez did not commute the gangster's prison term. But he ordered the immediate release of Vinny Unions, who had served 35 months of the 51-month sentence he'd received for extorting more than $600,000 from the president of a Queens-based construction workers union from 2001 until 2021. But Ricciardo died the day after the judge's order, while still locked up, according to the Bureau of Prisons.

In his one page ruling, Gonzalez ordered Ricciardo to serve out the balance of his sentence in "home detention," and for Vinny Unions to remain on supervised release for three years after that.

Back in February, when the judge meted out a prison term that was more than two years less than the 78 months that prosecutors had sought, Gonzalez stated it was "troubling" that in his plea for leniency Ricciardo did not apologize to the union official he had extorted for 20 years or voice any remorse for his decades as a career criminal.

"Judge, I'm done," Ricciardo had told the judge. "Nothing in my body is working," the wiseguy continued. "I'm not going to last that long. My body can't take it anymore. My mind can’t take it. I just want to retire to North Carolina with family."

"He knew he was sick and he knew that if he got caught this is where he'd end up," the judge told his lawyers, who had asked that their client be allowed to spend the rest of his days with his wife Janet in their home in Waxhaw, North Carolina.

Ricciardo was in North Carolina when he died last weekend, but it was at the federal prison hospital in Butner, a three hour drive north of the Charlotte suburb where his wife lives.

Vinny Unions, who also partnered with Bazoo Ragano in a lucrative scheme with the Bonanno soldier that raked in "tens of thousands of dollars a month" by selling fraudulently obtained safety certificates allowing hundreds of unqualified workers to toil on New York job sites, suffered his first heart attack when he was 38 years old.

By the time he was sentenced to 42 months in prison in 2005 for his first labor racketeering conviction by another federal judge who also rejected his request for a non-custodial prison term, Ricciardo had survived four more heart attacks.

Just as two other judges who handled the case before him had done, Gonzalez turned down every request for bail Vinny Unions made following his arrest in September of 2021. Each time, prosecutors would cite a tape-recorded talk the mobster had that June with turncoat mob associate Andrew Koslosky.

Ricciardo was recorded bragging that he was "not afraid to go to jail" and willing to shoot his suddenly reluctant extortion victim "right in front of his house" and "right in front of his wife and kid" if he stopped his extortion payments, Ricciardo told Koslosky, stating: "Call the police, fuck it, let me go, how long you think I'm gonna last anyway?"

In February, Gonzalez spared Vinny Unions a trip from the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny where he was housed awaiting trial, and then his sentencing, to the MDC, which is viewed as the worst prison in the New York area, to await his final designation to a federal prison. Which turned out to be Butner.

For two days after his death, the BOP database listed Ricciardo as "NOT IN BOP CUSTODY." At the same time, it stated that he was scheduled to be released in April of 2025, an indication that in line with the judge's order on August 16, he was in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and on his way home. By Tuesday, the prison database finally got it right.

[DonnieB]

Is this the first report of Vinny Unions passing??
Thanks for posting

[outfit guy]

It's incredible the lengths the Judge (government) will go to appease the Prosecution (government). Three loaded weapons in his house; one an automatic with serial numbers obfuscated. That alone is a 15 year sentence. Even is dropped as part of a plea, why does job not now include in sentencing as he's done so many other time I'm sure. Post-acquittal sentences based on other non-admissible or excluded evidence? This whole system is a joke. He's a rat. Will someone on the defense get up and demand the Judge explain how he can give no jail time?

[Southshore88]

Thanks for posting

[Little_Al1991]

Ricciardo’s motion was not opposed which is surprising