Gang Land News - 6/17/21

[mafiastudent]

FBI Snitch: My Dad Didn't Kill Mike Meldish, But We Were There When He Was Whacked

Gang Land Exclusive!

Frank Pasqua III, the drug-abusing Luchese turncoat who somehow managed to wrongly finger his father for the gangland-style slaying of mob associate Michael Meldish, has a new version of events, Gang Land has learned. Prosecutors say his first version was just an honest mistake. But now Pasqua claims he was there when Meldish was murdered, and was even able to say goodbye to his old friend minutes before he was killed.

In a Johnny and Gene show podcast that went missing shortly after it was produced a year ago, Pasqua also places his mobster father Frank Pasqua Jr. on the scene when the former Purple Gang leader was executed in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, according to an exclusive Gang Land viewing of the year-old podcast.

"I was on the street when he was killed; my father drove me there," said Pasqua. "We stopped at one of our nightclubs" on the way, Pasqua told co-hosts John Alite and Gene Borrello. "We met a guy who gave us a different car, because we all had brand-new Mercedes," he said. "They all had GPS and shit. So we swapped for like a kind of late model foreign car that didn't have any GPS," Pasqua continued. "We drove out there, and we were on the street. We went to see Mike. I got to see my friend a few minutes before he died, you know?"

Pasqua's new version contradicts what federal prosecutors have insisted throughout the case — that their evidence showed that the Pasquas were not even in the Bronx on November 15, 2013 when Meldish was shot to death as he sat in the driver's seat of his girlfriend's car that he had been using.

On the show, the burly 300-pound Pasqua also badmouthed mobster Christopher Londonio, the convicted getaway driver in the rubout. Pasqua called Londonio a "fat slob" and a "lifetime loser" who "would've killed his mother for" the "button" that acting Luchese crime family boss Matthew (Matty) Madonna "dangled in front of his face."

Pasqua also had choice words for Steven (Stevie Junior) Crea, their mob capo who had ordered the rubout. He called Stevie Junior a "has been" and a "never-was." He added that the second generation wiseguy should have been "shelved" for pleading guilty and taking a 13-year sentence against the wishes of his father, longtime underboss Steven (Stevie Wonder) Crea. He turned down a plea deal, was convicted at trial, and is now serving a life sentence.

There's a big "difference between myself and a lot" of the Luchese mobsters he's met over the years, the motor-mouth snitch boasted to the cohosts. They included Stevie Junior Crea, who like Pasqua, was also born into The Life, he said.

"The difference," said Pasqua, a college dropout, is that "a lot of them are just ignorant. I'm not saying they're stupid, they're ignorant. They have no educations, they have no way to support themselves in the world. I always made more money," he continued, in another shot at Stevie Junior. "My captain pushed a broom for a living. I made more money than all of them," he said.

Londonio, Stevie Junior, and his father "were mobsters, not gangsters," he said. "There's a big difference between a mobster, and a gangster," said Pasqua, who considered himself a true blue gangster, until he flipped, of course. "I loved being important, being the center of attention, being the guy everyone knew not to fuck with, and the guy everyone came to for help," he said.

Borrello, who met Pasqua in 2008 when they were both in state prison, fawned over his guest's gangster talents during the hour-long podcast. "We beat guys up together," said Borrello. "And he's a legit tough guy. He's one of the more modern-day guys that was really out there doing work. He should have been straightened out a long time ago."

The Luchese crime family was "scared" to induct the gangster that the feds signed up as a cooperating witness, Borrello said, "because they don't like wild guys with a button. He is definitely one of the toughest dudes I knew for our time. In jail, he was abusing gang members, taking remote controls from people. You know, the guy was just a tough dude."

Chicago-based reporter Lisa Babick, who has also viewed the podcast, writes below that Pasqua stated he had "the perfect fit for being a gangster," despite having a checkered mob heritage. His late grandfather was a respected Gambino soldier, but his father's brother, Richard, was a snitch like him, and that ended his father's chances of being inducted into the Gambino family, he said.

Pasqua was devastated when the younger Crea ordered him and his father to whack Meldish.

Michael Meldish"I was dear friends with Mike, and I was family with his brother Joe," said Pasqua. Joe Meldish, a former Purple Gang member suspected in dozens of killings, was convicted of murder in 2011. He is currently serving a 25-years to life prison term.

"I tried to influence a situation that was way above me," but "after talking to my father," he realized, he said, that his "has-been father" would never be able to influence the situation that the (acting) boss has already called in" so he "just shut it down."

That's because his old man was a wiseguy whose "button" was really a "lifetime achievement award" for spending 30 years "laughing at jokes that aren't funny (and) not squashing a grape," he said.

"I tried to put it out of my head," he said, noting that he had been talking down the idea, telling his father, "Look, this is Mike. This isn't some stranger, this is Mike." But eventually, he continued, "I said to myself, 'This is happening one way or another. I need to go through these motions, and it just needs to be done.'"

"If Joey (Meldish) was home," said Pasqua, "They never would have put this hit on Mike. And I'll tell you something else," he said, "Joey was home, and they would have told me to go kill Mike, I would have went right to Joey, and we would have killed four, five of them. And I would have stuck my deadbeat father in as boss, and took control. Definitely not go kill Mike."

"But Mike was a different kind of guy than Joe," and warning him would not have helped Meldish and also would have created a big problem for him, Pasqua opined.

"If I would have went to Mike and tipped him off," he said, "Mike would have went right to Matty. Said, 'Oh, you told my nephew to kill me?' That would have put me in a bad position. I tried to think of 100 different ways to get out of this situation," he said, but ultimately he decided to go along.

Pasqua went from reluctant participant to the triggerman in the game plan that he and his father ultimately worked out, he said.

"We were going to do like this fake heroin deal," said Pasqua, which is a similar scenario to the tall tale he first told the FBI. In that account, he was in their car when he heard what he thought was a shot. (It was a car door slamming, prosecutors said during pre-trial proceedings.) Seconds later, his father got back in his car and said: "It's done. And if anybody asks, say that you did it, so you get the credit for it."

At that point, he told the FBI in 2015, he thought his old man had killed Meldish, and was telling him to take credit for it because it would help him get inducted into the crime family.

Their plan to whack Meldish, he told Alite and Borrello, was "getting Mikey to come pick up some samples of heroin to give to his guys to sell. He was supposed to get the heroin, leave, call us at another date, let us know his order, and bring us our money. And when we did that," he said, "I was supposed to kill him."

During the hour-long podcast, Pasqua did not state specifically that they put that plan in motion on November 15, 2013, the day that Luchese gangster Terrence (T) Caldwell shot Meldish in the head and was driven away from the scene by Londonio. But he stated twice, most definitively, that he and his father "were on the street when he was killed."

In their sentencing memo last year a few months before Pasqua appeared on the now-defunct Johnny and Gene Show, prosecutors stated that their decision "not to call Pasqua at trial . . . was not based on concerns that Pasqua had provided false information about the murder." They implied he was bounced for selling and using "heroin and cocaine" while on bail before trial.

"Based on evidence known to the Government but not known to Pasqua," the prosecutors wrote that they credit "his account of his last meeting with Meldish" and that Pasqua's belief "for a time that (his father) had physically carried out the murder appears to be an honest misinterpretation of his observations, and not a fabrication."

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office were mum about Pasqua's podcast assertions that he was present when Meldish was killed and that in "his last meeting with Meldish" he said goodbye to his friend before he was shot to death. Chief Probation Officer Michael Fitzpatrick did not respond to a Gang Land query about Pasqua's seeming violation of supervised release (VOSR) for associating with ex-convicts Alite and Borrello.

"The government doesn't seem to care about reality, or fact checking," said Londonio's attorney John Meringolo. "All they're interested in, is the best narrative they can use to get a conviction. Everything else is secondary."

Meanwhile, Alite, the violent gangster whose friendship with a retired FBI agent and his re-incarnation as a multi-faceted businessman with world-wide ventures was featured in a Forbes Magazine takeout a few months ago, has renamed his podcast, Mafia Truths with John Alite. He told Gang Land that he's "embarrassed and frustrated" by the missing Pasqua podcast and that he and his current cohost, Felix Levine, are "doubling our efforts to get it aired next week."

Ex-cohost Borrello, who was sentenced to four months for threatening the husband of his ex-girlfriend in January and for a VOSR for associating with Alite for almost a year, is slated to be released from prison next week. He will have to serve three years of supervised release that include six months of home detention and a host of dos and don'ts for the next three years.

By Lisa Babick

Turncoat: Lucheses Gave Me No Respect, But They Asked Me To Kill The Bonanno Boss

Frank Pasqua III says he was born into The Life and that thanks to "thousands of years of evolution" he had qualities that made him "the perfect fit for being a gangster." But he got no respect from Luchese crime family leaders even though they considered him to be an "important" gangster.

Pasqua griped about the lack of respect he got on the Johnny And Gene Show as he discussed a very questionable murder plot he told the feds about, the Luchese family's alleged plan to do something that no mob family has done since the Mafia Commission outlawed it back in 1931: Kill a rival family boss.

Pasqua claims he learned about it, as Gang Land reported back in January, in 2016 when he was Luchese mobster Christopher Londonio's "bunkie for six months" at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, and Londonio was called upon to murder Michael (Mikey Nose) Mancuso.

Even though Pasqua told Alite and Borrello he "hated the guy," he had to "play a little bit of a role with the guy," and the job Londonio tasked him with could have been taken right out of a scene from a blockbuster action movie.

According to Pasqua, this happened "while (Pasqua) was in jail fighting a drug case" when "they didn't know I had already decided to flip on Chris. They told me they wanted me to kill Mikey Nose, boss of the Bonanno family. They said he's a cadre member at MCC — just ride up on a motorcycle and shoot him while he's . . . cleaning the roads."

"So, that's how much my crew cared about me," he complained. "You've been home 20 minutes in the last 11 years, we want you to shoot a guy in downtown Manhattan in front of all the officers that are watching. But you'll get away because you're on a motorcycle."

"And, honestly, that is when I flipped," he added. The lack of respect he apparently felt made him compromise his "moral belief to never rat out" and he told the FBI to "bring me a wire. I'll take care of this whole crew."

According to the government's March 3, 2020 sentencing memo, Londonio told Pasqua he had been "commissioned" by acting boss Matthew Madonna to kill Mancuso and he was seeking Pasqua's help to carry out the hit. At the time, Londonio was facing federal gun charges and Madonna was jailed in New Jersey for a state racketeering charge.

It was during this same time frame that Pasqua "learned that Chris Londonio had been charged by the state with the murder of Meldish" and suddenly realized that he wasn't involved in the Meldish slaying as he had previously told the FBI and was just "confused," prosecutor Scott Hartman stated during a bail hearing.

Of course, Pasqua could just be as confused about this alleged Mancuso hit as he was about the Meldish murder since he later told Johnny and Gene, "I was free on the street. No case. Called them up, told them about a murder I committed. Ended up doing six more years. I put myself in jail." This is a total contradiction of what he had just stated and it doesn't match up with the government's timeline.

According to the same government memo, Pasqua was "initially approached by the FBI" four years before he flipped, in 2012 when he was a "pretrial detainee." He met with FBI agents "four times" and "provided details about his prior criminal conduct" but "did not have actionable information" and "further efforts to develop him as a source were not pursued."

It wasn't until 2015 when he was arrested for selling heroin in Mississippi that he again reached out to tell the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn that he was there when his father shot and killed Meldish two years earlier. When they realized that was nonsense, they dropped him as unreliable. A year later, Hartman and his colleagues in Manhattan dusted him off and propped him up as a witness.

It's interesting, to say the least, that Pasqua sold himself as a cooperating witness when he told the FBI that Londonio had sought his help in whacking Mancuso but he never got Chris to mention it in the six tape recorded conversations they had, even after Pasqua was released on bail.

And Londonio never mentioned the Mancuso plot during any of the many "confessions" he made to the government's star trial witness, David Evangelista, the jailhouse snitch who resided in Londonio's cellblock a year later and alerted authorities about an escape plan that he had concocted. Londonio was acquitted of that charge in November 2019.

While the feds — as well as Pasqua's lawyer — made a big deal about his decision to tell the FBI about the alleged plot to kill Mancuso, they obviously didn't have any evidence that it was real, since they not only did not charge Madonna or Londonio with the crime, they didn't mention it at their sentencings.

But there might be another reason for all of Pasqua's confusion about the Meldish and the Mancuso murder plots — he was zonked out by all the drugs he was using. His value as a "government witness" was "significantly" reduced, according to court documents, because he was using and selling illegal drugs including methadone, cocaine, and heroin.

Editor's Note: Lisa Babick is a Chicago-based investigative journalist. She is the publisher of DefendantDigest.com and author of the 2020 free e-book, Guilt For the Guiltless.

Mobster Takes 30 Months For Assaulting Ex-Wife Of New Jersey Restaurateur Tommy Manzo

Luchese mobster John Perna was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars last week for assaulting the boyfriend of former reality TV star Dina Manzo. It is the first known time in Gang Land history where the reward for a beating contract was a discount on a wedding reception. But that's exactly what Perna got in payment, according to prosecutors: a reduced price for his big wedding bash — 330 guests — at the Paterson New Jersey Banquet Hall owned by Manzo's ex-husband, Tommy Manzo.

Perna may have gotten the jitters during secntencing. Perna's lawyer had worked out a pretty good plea deal with federal prosecutors, but Newark Federal Judge Kevin McNulty discussed the possibility of a monstrously high prison term up to115 months that the probation department had suggested. The judge also mused that a 50-month term seemed to fit the crime.

The 44-year-old mobster pleaded guilty to assaulting Dina Manzo's current husband, David Cantin with a slapjack on July 18, 2015. The assault occurred at a Passaic County strip mall, a month before Tommy Manzo allegedly rewarded Perna with a "deeply discounted" lavish wedding reception at The Brownstone, the catering hall that Manzo owns.

The gala affair, as Gang Land has reported, was attended by numerous Luchese family mobsters, including the since convicted and imprisoned for life acting boss and underboss, Matthew Maddona and Stevie Wonder Crea, as well as the crime family's most recent turncoat witness and podcaster, John Pennisi.

The remote sentencing proceeding lasted about an hour and 15 minutes. But Judge McNulty ultimately went along with the plea agreement that Perna attorney Stacy Biancamano had worked out with the government, and meted out a 30 month prison term and three years of post-prison supervised release. Perna was also ordered to pay $17,816 in restitution.

The judge imposed the agreed-upon sentence after prosecutors Grady O'Malley and Kendall Randolph noted that the probation department recommendation was based on incorrect info about the seriousness of Cantin's injuries and other factors, and after the prosecutors and Biancamano informed McNulty that Manzo, not Perna, was the alleged architect of the assault.

Biancamano and Perna each told the judge that the assault, his prior convictions, as well as the gangster's alcohol and drug use were part of his prior life that changed dramatically when he got married and began raising a family in August of 2015. McNulty put off the start of his prison term until September 15 to permit Perna to spend time with his family, and help his wife recover from cancer surgery that she is slated to undergo next month.

A trial date for Manzo, who also faces state assault charges for the 2017 home invasion and assault against his ex-wife and Cantin, has not been set. His next scheduled court appearance is in October.

Memo to Manzo attorneys Michael Critchley and Amy Luria and prosecutors O'Malley and Randolph: If you're interested in chatting with Pennisi about the Perna wedding in advance of the trial, Gang Land hears that he is charging $300 for a half hour chat and $500 for a full hour talk. His only caveat, he often states on The MBA and the Button Man podcast is that he doesn't "entertain negativity."

So if you remain upbeat and positive, you should be able to get his take on the wedding, and the conversation he had with Perna's brother Joe about it, something he has discussed with Gang Land, and has written about on his blog, Sitdown News.

As Gang Land reported last week, Tom LaVecchia, the cohost of Pennisi's podcast, says that Pennisi is offering "unbridled, unprecedented access" that is "available to everybody" who has "an appetite" for his stories about life on both sides of the law. LaVecchia says it "is a great opportunity to learn more about John" and "to learn more about The Life."

If you have extra time, you can ask him about the earth-shaking paranormal sign he got from his deceased grandparents when he prayed to them three years ago and asked them to send him a sign to let him know that he should turn himself in to the FBI.

[Shellackhead]

Thanks for posting, This Frank Pasqua guy talks a lot of shit

[chin_gigante]

Congratulations on the article this week Lisa. I know we haven't always been on the same page in the past but it's good to see anyone from the board with a guest spot on Gang Land News

[maatsetungi]

Frank Pasqua III says he was born into The Life and that thanks to "thousands of years of evolution" he had qualities that made him "the perfect fit for being a gangster." But he got no respect from Luchese crime family leaders even though they considered him to be an "important" gangster.

Hah

[AntComello]

Pasqua is a fucking clown...he said him would have whacked the lukes admin and put his father in as boss lmao

[Hired_Goonz]

Thanks for posting and congrats at getting published by Capeci. Lol at the whole Pasqua fiasco. Or maybe it's not so funny after all. Some of the shenanigans the FBI pull in mob cases are about as shady as these bogus terrorism cases they manufacture. It's disturbing to say the least.

[Ozgoz]

Congrats MS.

Capeci is behaving like these knucklehead rats and their YouTube beefs for clicks. It’s embarrassing.

Maybe time for him to put down the pen and our Lisa to take over his work.

[Dapper_Don]

Lisa congrats on the feature

Capeci taking a couple of swipes at JP just petty really

[Uforeality]

Seems to me that the Luchese crime family is kinda dysfunctional.

[Uforeality]

Oh, and thanks for the read!

[JohnnyS]

Thanks for posting and congrats on the feature!

[newera_212]

One of the best GL's in a long time. Good stuff.

Unbelievable this Pasqua kid. It's hilarious they're still trying to go through with airing the episode...what a shit show

Serious question and not trying to drum up any shit... but if this episode does air, could it help Crea or Londonio at all?

[joeycigars]

Great article MS, What a tangled web

[Wiseguy]

"If Joey (Meldish) was home," said Pasqua, "They never would have put this hit on Mike. And I'll tell you something else," he said, "Joey was home, and they would have told me to go kill Mike, I would have went right to Joey, and we would have killed four, five of them. And I would have stuck my deadbeat father in as boss, and took control. Definitely not go kill Mike."

Yeah, that's what would have happened.

[Dave65827]

Hate to judge a book by its cover but Pasqua looks like he took the retarded bus to school