Gangland July 4th 2024

[Dr031718]

One Down, 15 Coming Soon; But 34 Still Hanging Tough In The Frank Camuso State Racketeering Case

More than a dozen mob-connected defendants have agreed to cop guilty pleas to resolve charges in the state racketeering case against 26 construction companies and two dozen members and associates of the Genovese and Gambino family charged with stealing $5 million from the builders of dozens of Manhattan high-rise apartments and hotels, Gang Land has learned.

Sources tell Gang Land that as many as 15 defendants — the number includes individuals and corporations — have agreements in principle to plead guilty to lesser charges in the 83-count enterprise corruption indictment that accuses the mobsters and their cohorts of using a bribery and bid-rigging scheme from 2013 until 2021 to line their own pockets.

The sources say that the Manhattan District Attorney's office has promised no-jail plea deals to the individual defendants in the group in an effort to push the major players — Gambino capo Frank Camuso, Genovese soldier Christopher Chierchio, and the central figure in the scheme, Robert (Rusty) Baselice — to either plead guilty in the two-year-old case or prepare for trial.

So far, only one defendant has pleaded guilty. Vincenzo Ferrara, 51, who toiled for a Maspeth electrical company that allegedly conspired with Baselice to obtain $7 million in subcontracts on three Manhattan projects and stole $240,000 from a developer, received three years of probation for conspiring with Baselice in the scheme. He was also ordered to pay $80,000 in restitution.

Baselice, 52, a former vice president of the Rinaldi Group, a Secaucus-based contractor allegedly received $4.2 million in payments from contractors who received $100 million in contracts and change orders he awarded them in return for the kickbacks that were funneled to a Staten Island company he controlled.

Chierchio, 56, and his plumbing company RCI PLBG Inc., are charged with receiving $13 million in subcontracts from the Rinaldi Group and teaming up with Baselice to steal $300,000 from a developer. At Baselice's direction, the wiseguy allegedly funneled $175,000 in kickbacks to companies owned by codefendants, including Camuso.

Camuso, 60, is the alleged top of the lengthy food chain. He allegedly received $750,000 in kickbacks that were deposited in accounts of three companies that the Staten Island based capo controlled from five companies that were owned and operated from 2014 through 2020 by two accused crew members, Gambino soldier Louis Astuto, and mob associate Paul Noto.

During the investigation, prosecutors wiretapped cellphones belonging to Camuso and other top defendants. Astuto, 59, and Noto, 44, were overheard discussing the long-running scheme on dozens of tape-recorded phone calls between February of 2019 and February of 2020. The duo allegedly received $2.8 million in kickbacks from Baselice.

"The game plan" that has been carried out in recent weeks by veteran prosecutor Christopher Beard, who was recently assigned to the case by DA Alvin Bragg in an effort to get it resolved as soon as possible, according to one Gang land source, is to "pare down the case to a reasonable number of defendants and push the others to trial."

Sources say that Beard, who began his career as a prosecutor back in 1990 under legendary Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, "has been pushing very hard to narrow it down and dial up the heat on the lead defendants" for whom the District Attorney's office "will be seeking jail time," according to one knowledgeable source.

The sources say Beard, who is the DA's "senior supervising attorney for labor racketeering," does not intend to offer any member of the mob connected quintet, whose lawyers declined to comment or could not be reached, a no-jail plea deal. They note that labor racketeer Lawrence Wecker, 84, took two-to-six years for falsely claiming that women and minority owned businesses were doing drywall work that his firm did to resolve his enterprise corruption case — a sentence that represents a possible yardstick for Camuso and his sidekicks as they contemplate trial.

Gang Land was unable to determine whether Ferrara's company, Right Away Electric LLC, and two of its indicted officials, who are listed as defendants in the case that is slated for a status conference before acting Supreme Court Justice Miriam Best on August 7, are among the 15 defendants who have agreed to cop plea deals and resolve their cases in the coming weeks.

The two Right Away defendants, Vincent Vennera, 44, and Yaakov (Heshy) Pfeiffer, 46, like all the individuals awaiting trial, have been released without bail since they surrendered to face the charges in January of last year. Ferrara, who pleaded guilty a year ago to stealing $660,000 from one developer, fared pretty well, getting probation and an $80,000 restitution bill.

"They're starting to push very hard to get defendants to decide to go one way or the other before the next court date," said one defense lawyer who agreed to speak to Gang Land only if granted anonymity.

Beard's message to defendants who've agreed to plead guilty, according to a second defense attorney, is: "Take the deal or get ready for trial."

That's easier said than done, even if all 15 defendants plead guilty.

Best, the third judge to handle the case, was assigned to the humongous case only last month. The charges include grand larceny, bribery, commercial bribery, both giving and receiving, money laundering, and conspiracies to commit various degrees of those crimes.

In addition, Best has to decide defense motions of the remaining defendants to suppress numerous taped talks, emails, and other evidence seized during search warrants of homes, cars and offices in New York and New Jersey. Trial prosecutors Meredith McGowan, Guy Tardanico and Jaime Hickey-Mendoza have opposed that in a 321-page reply.

The potential mega-trial also presents logistical problems: Gang Land has yet to see a state courtroom in Manhattan that is large enough to try an enterprise corruption case with 34 defendants, even if most of them are corporations.

And while state court judges can divide an indictment into several trials, the process is a bit more complicated than it is for federal court judges. Gang Land hasn't encountered one of those in a state court case, and was unable to get an explanation of how that could be accomplished by the Court's public information officer.

Bragg's office also declined to comment on the case and its status.

The defendants also include a husband and wife team, Jeaninc, 55, and Mario Garafola, 63, a nephew of former underboss Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, and their construction company. They allegedly obtained $7 million in contracts from Baselice, stole $700,000 from a developer and gave $238,000 in kickbacks to Camuso in 2017 and 2018.

A father and daughter team, Michael DeBellas, 70, and his daughter Michelle, 52, allegedly obtained $8 million in subcontracts for the work their Manhattan masonry firm performed on five Manhattan building projects and stole $50,000 from a developer that their company gave to Baselice in return for the contracts he awarded them.

All told, it was a heck of a take down of a major mob-tied construction racketeering operation. All Bragg's office needs now is to win convictions of the top players.

Tony Cakes Conigliaro; A Good Businessman; A Lousy Wheel Man

Genovese wiseguy Anthony (Tony Cakes) Conigliaro survived many close calls. He was long suspected of being the wheel man in the "mercy killing" of a mobster who had become mentally unbalanced, but managed to dodge serious jail time. He survived all the bloody mob violence of the 1980s and 1990s. Last month, on June 12, however, he died the way too many New York City pedestrians do: Crossing the street near his Brooklyn home. He was flattened by a truck. And that was all she wrote. He was 86.

Conigliaro rose to the rank of acting capo for the powerful crime family in the 1990s. He was originally sponsored for membership by his close pal, family consigliere James (the Little Guy) Ida. And he was nicknamed "Tony Cakes" thanks to his successful businesses, including a company he called "Coney Island Sweets" where he bought cakes and pastries wholesale and sold them to restaurants around the New York area. He ran the cake business out of his apartment on Dahlgreen Place in Bay Ridge where he lived alone.

He also owned the Hollywood Terrace, a popular Bensonhurst catering hall on New Utrecht Avenue for decades. Tony Cakes was a much better businessman than he was as getaway driver.

Back on November 25, 1988, Conigliaro was allegedly behind the wheel of a getaway car for a hit team dispatched to take out Anthony (Hickey) DiLorenzo, a gangster who was deemed to have "lost his mind" and was sentenced to death by the mob.

Conigliaro, however, failed to wait for The Little Guy's older brother, Joseph Ida, to return to the car after the killing. Ida was left to flee on his own and call for help — calls that later led to his brother's conviction in the murder.

Unlike Vincent Gigante, the Genovese boss who walked the Greenwich Village streets, pretending to be nuts, DiLorenzo wasn't faking. At a competency hearing for Gigante, former Luchese acting boss Alfonso (Little Al) D'Arco testified that Chin was pretending to be crazy, noting that if he wasn't, Gigante would be killed.

Alfonso D'Arco"He would have a terminal illness right away," he said.
"What," said the judge.
"They would kill him, your honor. Terminal illness. They call it a mercy killing," D'Arco said.

In the weeks before DiLorenzo was whacked, Little Al had told fellow Luchese wiseguys that his old friend Hickey was "becoming unhinged" when he saw them talking to DiLorenzo in a social club on Prince Street next to Ray's Pizza, the legendary pizzeria operated for years by drug dealing mobster Ralph (Raffie) Cuomo.

About a week before Hickey was killed, as Tom Robbins and yours truly wrote in Mob Boss: The Life Of Little Al D'Arco, Little Al saw the unhinged DiLorenzo speaking to several mobsters at Jimmy Ida's club on Mulberry Street, Tazza di Caffe, and learned a few minutes after Hickey and the others walked out the door, that his old friend wasn't long for this world.

Ida was seething that wiseguys were still hanging around and speaking to DiLorenzo. And he told D'Arco how upset he was, when they left the club, as we wrote in Mob Boss.

"He says, 'Why do these guys stay around him? Why do they give him confidence like that? Don't they know to stay away from him?"

D'Arco began to ask him why the Genoveses didn't tell their soldier to stop. "But Ida interrupted him," we wrote. "In a low murmur, Ida said, 'You know what we're going to do, right? We're going to whack him.'"

A few nights later, D'Arco saw Hickey for the last time, again on Prince Street. DiLorenzo stepped out of Ray's Pizza after a meeting with Cuomo and drug dealer Joseph (Joe Beck) DePalermo and drove off in a "red sports car" after telling Al, "How do you like it? I just got these new wheels."

Despite his failure to wait for Joey Ida back in 1988, law enforcement sources say Jimmy Ida sponsored Tony Cakes for membership and he was inducted into the crime family in 1991.

After the DiLorenzo hit, according to court records, Joey Ida lost his hat as he ran through a concrete birdbath and scaled a fence to get away, only to find that his getaway driver, Conigliaro, had left. But Joey kept on trucking, making four collect calls to his brother Jimmy's home, the last one some eight miles from the murder scene.

The feds used those phone calls to convict Jimmy Ida, now 84 and serving a life sentence for DiLorenzo's murder. But Joey Ida and Conigliaro were never charged in the killing.

Eventually, Joey got in touch with gangster Philip LaPorta, who was in on the planning but not the killing. LaPorta picked up Joey and drove him home. During the ride, Joey, who was "covered with blood," told LaPorta he had "strangled and pistol whipped DiLorenzo and shot him once in the face," according to an affidavit by FBI agent Robert Doherty that Gang Land obtained back in 2000, when we wrote about Ida's involvement in the killing.

At the time, Joey Ida and Conigliaro were charged with loansharking by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, for which the duo received probation.

Six years later, the feds used the same evidence to hit them with federal loansharking charges. That cost Ida a 15-month sentence. Tony Cakes endured a 13-month stretch, and following his release from prison in 2008, had no further trouble with the law.

Conigliaro is believed to be survived by two adult children and several grandchildren, but Gang Land was unable to obtain any details about them or where Tony Cakes was laid to rest.

Imprisoned Wiseguy's Daughter Plans Ahead; Gets Her Passport Back While Behind Bars

Amanda Lubrano, the daughter of Luchese mobster Joseph (Big Joey) Lubrano, recently began serving her 22-month sentence for selling a kilogram of cocaine to an undercover agent. But she, and her partner-in-crime are already thinking ahead to their release from the only federal prison in the tristate area that houses women.

Lubrano, 31, who is slated for release in November of 2025, and Elina Bagga, 34, who received a six-month sentence and is due out of the Danbury, Connecticut facility in October, have already won the return of their passports which were confiscated while they were out on bail, according to court filings in their case.

Lubrano is also the daughter of Nancy Rossi, the current paramour of Genovese boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo.

She and Bagga are two of the 105 women currently confined at Danbury. The prison also houses 1053 male inmates in a separate facility (Trump crony Steve Bannon joined them there this week.) It is a sought-after facility for convicted New Yorkers and their family members due to its proximity to the five boroughs.

Lubrano and Bagga receive "many of the same educational and treatment programs" as male prisoners in addition to "specific gender-based needs" for women who are "more likely to be primary caregivers for children, experience economic hardship, employment instability, and have fewer vocational skills" than men, according to the Bureau of Prison's website.

The duo's successful efforts to get their passports returned to them while they are each behind bars and still have three years of post-prison supervised release were markedly different from the efforts of Philadelphia mob boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino to retrieve his for more than four months after he had completed his supervised release in July of 2021.

For reasons that were never fully explained, Merlino's passport was forwarded to the State Department in Washington and held for safekeeping after he surrendered it to pre-trial services in Manhattan following his arrest on racketeering charges in 2016, and his release on bail.

After not being able to locate and return it to Skinny Joey for several months following "multiple calls and emails" from Merlino's lawyers and a federal prosecutor in his case, a State Department bureaucrat in Washington took only one day to find and return the passport to the mob boss in November of 2021 via UPS's next day air service.

That happened when Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Sullivan ordered the official to travel from the nation's capital to Manhattan and appear in court at 9 AM on Thanksgiving eve and "show cause why the representative and/or the Department should not be held in contempt of court" for the failure of the agency's 11,000 employees to get Merlino's passport back to him.

Three years later, someone must have learned a lesson. Pre-trial services in Brooklyn held on to the passports that Lubrano and Bagga gave them. It took just a few days for the defendants to get them back after Brooklyn Federal Judge Carol Amon told the agency to return them.

[Dr031718]

Jimmy Ida

[Tonyd621]

Louie Astuto aka Louie "Fats?" Is this the Louie Astuto that was around in the gotti era?
Thank for posting

[JohnnyS]

Louie Astuto aka Louie "Fats?" Is this the Louie Astuto that was around in the gotti era?
Thank for posting

It's his son. Louie fats died in 1994.

[Pmac2]

thank you for posting. capeci still the top dog . happy 4th

[Dr031718]

Happy 4th everyone

[Niagarafalls]

Has anyone found a picture of Nancy Rossi? She’s gotta be pretty good looking.

[JohnnyS]

Has anyone found a picture of Nancy Rossi? She’s gotta be pretty good looking.

[AntComello]

Has anyone found a picture of Nancy Rossi? She’s gotta be pretty good looking.

Wonder how many made guys she’s ran through lol not the best picture of her but I see the potential. Lubranos other baby mother has to be pushing 50+ and she is still beautiful.

[Russ]

Big joey librano has been the same age for 31 years? Editing mistakes or is his son big joey too?

[SonnyBlackstein]

Do we know if Lubrano holds any position currently

[SonnyBlackstein]

Has anyone found a picture of Nancy Rossi? She’s gotta be pretty good looking.

Pipe-fitter lips.

[TommyGambino]

She looks like a bulldog chewing a wasp, probably a bad photo