Gangland:5/19/16

[Dellacroce]

May 19, 2016 This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci

Feds: Genovese Old-Timer Teamed Up With Crips Gangstas In Mob Murder Plot

The feds finally got around to making it official. Last week, they announced what Gang Land reported several months ago: Two years ago, Nassau County detectives investigating a mob gambling ring happened upon, and busted, a very unorthodox murder plot in which the powerful, sophisticated Genovese family allegedly hired members of a street gang aligned with the Crips to do their dirty work.

An expanded eight-count indictment identified a little-known, but influential, 74-year-old wiseguy named Robert Debello, who has two fitting nicknames, Grandpa and Old Man, as the main player in the case. Debello and seven others were hit with various racketeering charges stemming from the arrest of a carload of hired guns who were on their way to whack a hot-headed gangster at his Whitestone, Queens home in June of 2014.

Sources say Debello has close ties to the crime family's current "street boss," Peter (Petey Red) DiChiara. Back in 2001, he was indicted on racketeering charges along with DiChiara and dozens of other Genovese gangsters. A year later, Debello copped a plea deal to a racketeering assault charge and served four months of home detention.

Despite his advancing years, Debello is apparently considered a soldier with ability and value. Sources say that last year, Genovese boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo asked him to take over Petey Red's lower East Side crew. Even though the job came with a promotion to acting capo, the Old Man passed on the offer, choosing to stick to the shadows.

"He's a low-key guy and is sick that he got dragged into this mess," said one knowledgeable Gang Land source.

Debello, and two other newly charged defendants, Genovese associate Ryan (Baldy) Ellis, and Bertram (Birdy) Duke, the brother of a key cooperating witness in the case, were each detained as dangers to the community by Magistrate Judge Ronald Ellis at their arraignments Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court.

Ellis was convicted in 2013 of extortion along with former mob supervisor, capo Conrad Ianniello. He and Debello are both charged with racketeering, murder conspiracy and attempted murder. The flubbed murder bid stems from two alleged attempts to whack family associate Joseph Bonelli on June 7, and June 8, 2014.

Duke is also a two-timer. He spent five years in state prison for a 1999 armed robbery conviction in Westchester. In the current case, he is charged with being part of a murder-for-hire conspiracy to kill Bonelli, and with conspiring to use a weapon in the same murder-for-hire conspiracy.

Sources say Bonelli, a onetime bodyguard chauffeur for Genovese soldier Michael (Hippy) Zanfardino, was marked for death after he embarrassed Baldy Ellis, a 300-pound bruiser, during a face-off in early 2014.

The sources say Bonelli, an ex-con who got out of prison in 2012 after doing four years for selling cocaine, took a baseball bat away from Ellis during a squabble over a bet. Bonelli was said to have stood tall for a lucky pal who won the wager, while Ellis weighed in on behalf of a bookmaker who was said to be trying to stiff the gambler.

Debello, Ellis, 34, and Duke, 48, were among 14 defendants who were arrested in New York and on Long Island by FBI agents and detectives from Nassau County and the NYPD. The trio joined four defendants — Debello crew member Salvatore (Fat Sal) Deligatti, 40, and three reputed members of the Crips — who have been locked up since their arrests on murder-for-hire charges in October.

Sources say much of the information that prosecutors used to expand the charges and raise the total number of defendants to 18 came from a former Debello crew member named Robert Sowulski who was also nabbed in October but is not a defendant in the current case.

Records show Sowulski was released from the Metropolitan Correctional Center just two days before the new indictment was unsealed. Sources say Sowulski, 35, switched sides and joined Team America earlier this month. According to court records, he provided the car used in the two failed hit attempts against Bonelli.

As Gang Land disclosed in January, the driver of the car, Kelvin Duke, a longtime Delligatti friend who put together the hit team, was stopped a few blocks away from Bonelli's home on June 8, 2014. He began cooperating last year. Luckily for Bonelli, the hit team could not get a clear shot at him the night before, according to the feds. Sources say Fat Sal agreed to pay Duke, 58, a career criminal with an arrest record that goes back 40years, $5000 to kill Bonelli.

When Nassau detectives stopped the car, a 2013 Nissan Sentra owned by Sowulski's girlfriend, they seized a loaded .38 caliber revolver with hollow point bullets from one of the passengers, Marcus Brown, 26. Brown, and the other passengers, Tyrone (Ty) McCullum, 37, and Sharif (QB) Brown, have been behind bars since their arrest in October. Detectives also found a cell phone in the car that Duke had used to talk to Deligatti about the murder plot, according to court records.

The last accused member of the murder plot is Luigi (Louis Sunoco) Romano, who operates a gas station, a mini-mart and a car wash on the Cross Island Parkway service road a few blocks from Bonelli's home. Romano, 38, has no prior criminal record. He is the only defendant charged in the murder-for-hire plot whom prosecutors did not seek to detain without bail.

Sources say Romano is a good friend of Delligatti, has had a grudge against Bonelli going back more than two years, and was intimately involved in the murder-for-hire plot.

But the prosecution team — assistant U.S. attorneys Samson Enzer, James McDonald, and Jordan Estes, and Nassau assistant district attorney Jeremy Glicksman — agreed with defense lawyer Joseph Conway to release Romano under home detention with electronic monitoring. Tuesday, right before Conway stepped out of the case, he got approval from Federal Judge Laura Swain for Romano to leave his house from 6AM to 8PM "to attend to work and family matters."

The complicated indictment accuses Debello, Ellis, and Delligatti, and a reputed mobster who is not charged in the murder plot, Steven Pastore, 51, of being part of a racketeering conspiracy with other members and associates of the Genovese crime family who engaged in illegal activity including extortion and gambling from 2008 until this month.

Pastore, and nine others charged only with illegal gambling activities from 2013 until this year, were all released on bail. Judge Swain has scheduled a status conference for all 18 defendants for today.

"Whether you are an old school made member of the mob or a young street criminal looking to join it, the message today is clear: the life of a mobster is a dead-end street," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, calling the charges "an important blow against the Genovese crime family." In a news release, Bharara praised a team effort by the FBI, NYPD, Nassau County PD, and "in particular, the Nassau County District Attorney's office, for the incredible work in this important case."

FBI Comedy Of Errors Over Gotti Tapes No Laughing Matter For Frank Locascio

The six-year-long quest by former Gambino consigliere Frank (Frankie Loc) Locascio to obtain a 26-year-old tape recording that might prove he is innocent of committing a mob rubout with John Gotti has turned into a Keystone Kops-like comedy of errors involving FBI officials in New York, New Jersey and Washington.

But the imprisoned 83-year-old wiseguy isn't laughing at the farce-like twists and turns that have stymied efforts he began in 2010 to get an unenhanced copy of a crucial December 12, 1989 discussion he had with his late Mafia boss about mobster Louis DiBono — some 10 months before he was shot to death in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center.

First off, the FBI told Locascio that releasing the old tapes — portions of which have been heard by millions of Americans on radio, TV, YouTube and many online reports — could jeopardize ongoing investigations more than two decades later. If so, that's a big whoops. Gang Land has had seven snippets on our website for about 20 years, including one in which Gotti talks to Locascio about the DiBono hit.

Next, Locascio filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit demanding the evidence that sent him to prison for life. That's when the FBI actually went looking for the originals, only to learn in February that the tapes, as well as some copies, had been "damaged beyond repair by Hurricane Sandy" in 2012 while they were stored in a vault in New Jersey.

All was not lost, however: A month later, diligent FBI agents located other copies of the tapes, including the key December 12, 1989 conversation about DiBono. These were turned over to Ruth Liebesman, Locascio's attorney.. She immediately sent them off to an audio expert to see if it was possible to enhance an inaudible portion of the taped talk. That's the crucial segment where Locascio recalls telling an angry Gotti not to whack DiBono after the Dapper Don said he was having the contractor killed for "refusing to come in when I called."

In an affidavit, Frankie Loc says he told Gotti that he expected DiBono to bring him a $50,000 payoff and that he advised the Mafia boss, "in sum and substance, to take the money and forget about his anger with DiBono."

But just when it looked like Frankie Loc was finally going to get a crack at proving his claim, the government threw him yet another curve ball. Last month, on April 15, the US attorney's office in D.C. wrote Liebesman that the FBI determined that it had messed up. It had mistakenly given her the tapes, and the FBI wanted them back. That's because six years after Gotti and Locascio were sentenced to life in prison, in 1998, trial Judge I. Leo Glasser sealed the tapes.

As you might expect, after trying to get them for six years, Locascio didn't want to return them. Liebesman refused, stating that her client "declines to follow the demand of the FBI." The lawyer cited numerous reasons – based on legal citations and common sense – why the tapes, which were written about in books and available on YouTube were "not under seal in any real sense of the word." She argued that Frankie Loc should not have to return them to the FBI.

At this point, the feds in DC called in the heavy artillery, the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn, which prosecuted Locascio and wants him to leave prison the same way Gotti did back in 2002 — in a body bag. So earlier this month, assistant U.S. attorney Kristin Mace, a deputy chief of the office's organized crime unit, filed papers with Judge Glasser demanding the return of the so-called "sealed" tapes. No so fast, said Glasser. He ordered Liebesman to file her own court papers opposing their return by Monday.

Glasser is already on record as supremely skeptical of Frankie Loc's bid to revisit the old recordings. The judge ruled back in 2011 that Locascio's claim was nothing more than "a thinly disguised effort to re-litigate a ruling made during the trial." Should Glasser again side with the government and rule against Locascio, the attorney said she intends to abide by the Judge's ruling.

"I don't obey the US attorney," she told Gang Land. "This is an adversarial system, I obey the judge. The Judge did not order me to return them. If he does, I will."

Even if Glasser sides with the government, the defense audio expert may have the tapes long enough to enhance them and find the words that Locascio recalls telling Gotti before Liebesman has to give them back to the FBI. The Judge is not expected to issue his ruling on the matter until after the government files its reply next month.

It's difficult to predict what will happen in the unlikely event that Locascio's memory of what he said nearly 27 years ago in a discussion in an apartment above the Ravenite Social Club is borne out by the mobster's audio expert. But it's hard to fathom that it will somehow help the ailing Frankie Loc, a shell of the gangster who stood tall and praised Gotti as a hero on their sentencing day, avoid the same fate as the Dapper Don.

Jurors Were Split 6-6 In State Racketeering Trial Of Four Bonannos

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office might want to rethink its strategy regarding the re-trial of four accused Bonanno crime family members on state racketeering charges. That's according to one version of the jury's deliberations that emerged following the three-month-long trial that ended in a mistrial last week.

The jurors were split 6-6 in the only vote they took during their nine days of deliberations about the complicated enterprise corruption case in which the gangsters were charged with committing 299 separate crimes called pattern acts, according to defense attorney Adam Konta, who told Gang Land he spoke to one juror for several hours.

"My understanding," said Konta, "is that two jurors were for conviction, and half were leaning for acquittal, with the others not sure. But problems with the jury foreman came up, and that pushed the undecideds to the conviction side. The only vote they took, this juror told me, was 6-6."

Konta said that the juror told him the panel "really hadn't decided" any of the important issues in the case, namely whether the defendants had committed any of the accused crimes in New York county, or whether their criminal activity "was for the Bonanno crime family."

The defendants, wiseguys Nicholas (Nicky Mouth) Santora, 73, Vito Badamo, 53, Ernest Aiello, 36, and Anthony (Skinny) Santoro, 52, were charged with committing gambling, loansharking, grand larceny and extortion under the Bonanno crime family umbrella from March of 2010 until February of 2012.

The juror told Konta that jurors were sure that the defendants had committed crimes, but that the panel never made a decision about any of the individual charges.

The lawyer quoted the juror as stating: "We thought Skinny might have committed some of the pattern acts, but we weren't sure if he did as part of the enterprise. We believed Nicky (Santora) was a Bonanno back in the 80sand 90s, but we weren't sure about now."

"They never even got around to talking about Ernie (Aiello) or Vito," said Konta.

The lawyer's remarks gibe with an exclusive report by Staten Island Advance reporter Mira Wassef, who covered the trial from beginning to end, and who wrote that two jurors had reported that "the jury held a secret vote that revealed the 12 panelists were split 6-6."

The two jurors contradicted the assertions by Juror #9 that the jury was 9-3 for conviction and that he and the foreman were in the minority and were being browbeaten by others to switch.

In a joint statement, Wassef wrote, the two jurors told the Advance: "Throughout the process, juror No. 9 claimed he did not share the same opinions as Juror No. 1, so we were surprised when he stated he could not continue deliberating after Juror No. 1's dismissal."

Before Judge Mark Dwyer declared a mistrial, he dismissed the jury foreman after several jury members complained that he was unable to hear the many wiretapped phone calls that they had re-played for them during their deliberations. A date for the re-trial will be set next month.

A spokeswoman for the DA's office, who said last week that the "inability of one juror to continue deliberating is not a reflection on the overall strength of the case," declined to comment about the reports that the jury's 6-6 split seemed to be a reflection on the strength of the case.

Meanwhile, despite the mistrial, and spending nearly three years behind bars awaiting trial, three of the four defendants are still detained. Santora is at the Bellevue Hospital prison ward, trying to secure a $500,000 bond to secure his release. Badamo and Santoro need a $250,000 bond to get off Rikers Island.

Aiello, who was released on a $250,000 bond Tuesday, "is thrilled to be home with his wife and children," said his attorney Stacey Richman. "We look forward to the retrial."

[willychichi]

Maybe Locascio has a shot after all however slim it's better than none.

[Hailbritain]

Interesting that debello turned the job as acting capo down when dichiara was upped , think roserio gangi could possibly be acting capo of that crew ??

[moneyman]

What are we to assume with Capeci putting "street boss" in quotes like that? Seems like DiChiara role is ambiguous.. is he acting, street, under and consigliere?

[Pogo The Clown]

In retrospect DeBello should have taken the promotion. He is going to prison anyway, might as well make a little more money before you do.


And those jurors are freakin morons.


Thanks for posting this weeks column Dellacroce.


Pogo

[Chucky]

Capeci alluded to DiChiara being consiglieri in his article about Bellomo being the new boss, so maybe DeBello was offered the capo spot since DiChiara was now apart of the administration?

[SonnyBlackstein]

Good points HailBritan and Moneyman, regards Gangi and DiChiara's title.

Reflects poorly on the Bonannos that a capo can't post 500k bail or an acting 250k.
You'd think the admin would do a whip round if not for nothing more than family image.

[brianwellbrock]

Dicharia is the acting street boss under the consiglieri.

[NYNighthawk]

Hey Frankie - shit happens