Gangland 8/12/21

[Dr031718]

25 Years Later, Turncoat Wisgeuy Gets Another Sweet Plea Deal

Gang Land Exclusive!Frank GioiaEx-Luchese mobster Frank Gioia Jr. has done it again. He's in a different state, charged with different crimes. And his name is now Frank Capri. But after hanging tough for 18 months on monumental fraud charges calling for prison terms up to 33 years behind bars, he copped a sweet plea deal — one that guarantees he'll be back on the street in less than three years.

That's because his plea agreement with the feds states that the Arizona Federal Court Judge who imposes sentence on him for the two five-year-counts that he pleaded guilty to, wire fraud and tax evasion, must make the prison terms concurrent with each other, not consecutive.

And this time, Gioia-Capri won't have to spill his guts against any co-conspirators or other criminals he surely knows, at least according to the plea agreement and his guilty plea to resolve charges that he engineered a $64 million bustout scam involving the opening and closing of branded restaurants in dozens of cities across the country from 2008 to 2017.

Frank GioiaExcept for a concern that Capri raised about the maximum prison term he could receive during his remote telephone proceeding with Phoenix U.S. Magistrate Judge John Boyle Tuesday, the ex-New Yorker uttered mostly one word responses during the session, including the key word he stated twice, "Guilty."

As Boyle assured him Tuesday — a few minutes after the judge wished Capri a "Happy Birthday" when he stated he was pleading guilty on his 54th birthday — "the cap is five years. It's a maximum sentence of five years on each count, and they have to run concurrently, so effectively it's a cap of five years."

Capri did agree to pay up to $18 million in restitution to "all his victims" in those years, and to pay $1.5 million in taxes he didn't pay for his earnings from 2013-to-2015, but it's likely that the enterprising turncoat wiseguy has something squirreled away somewhere that he'll be able to retrieve when he gets out of prison.

Under Bureau of Prisons protocol, Capri's mandatory get-out-of-jail date would be in about 33 months, in May of 2024, since he has already served about 18 months in prison. That means he would be eligible for release into a halfway house up to a year earlier, around May of 2023.

Capri's former life as Frank Gioia Jr., the mob defector who received a new identity under the federal Witness Security Program and relocated to Arizona more than 20 years ago after he testified at several trials in New York, never came up during the 35-minute-long session. There is no mention in public filings that Capri was a Luchese mobster whom the feds have credited with helping to convict more than 70 mobsters, drug dealers and a cop killer.

Toby KeithIn "yes" responses to Boyle's reading of the "elements" of his crimes and the "factual basis" for his guilty plea, Capri admitted that after obtaining a licensing agreement in 2008 "to construct and operate a chain of restaurants" named for musician Toby Keith, he stole $12,997,478 in funds that he agreed to use to build and open the restaurants.

Instead of building and opening new Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill restaurants, Capri directed employees of his company, Boomtown Management, "to divert funds out of the individual restaurant and main Boomtown bank accounts for his personal use, including to purchase luxury vehicles, expensive real estate, and jewelry."

From 2011 through 2015, Capri admitted that he "spent more than $2,700,000 of Boomtown funds on jewelry purchases" and "frequently used debit cards from Boomtown accounts to pay his personal expenses," and that by 2012, he "was diverting as much as $250,000 a week from Boomtown accounts for personal expenses."

And from 2015 to 2017, Capri admitted forming new entities "to construct and operate a new chain of restaurants" named for the country music group Rascal Flatts and then using similar schemes that he used in the Toby Keith scam to steal $5,035,225 in funds that he stated were going to be used to open the second group of "branded restaurants that never opened."

As Gang Land reported after Capri was indicted last year, Boomtown actually built — or began constructing — several of the 40 branded Toby Keith eateries that were promised from 2009 to 2015 that opened for business. But all went belly up, and are the subject of millions of dollars in civil judgments against Capri and his businesses, according to the Arizona Republic.

Rascal FlattsThe paper's investigative reporter, Robert Anglen, first disclosed that Gioia had reinvented himself as Frank Capri in the Grand Canyon State when he broke the story about the transplanted gangster's scam involving the Toby Keith restaurants in 2017.

In order to maintain the luxurious life-style he had created when the Toby Keith scheme dried up, the 16-count indictment alleged that Capri began the second bust-out scheme in 2015 that involved 20 proposed restaurants licensed by the Rascal Flatts band. But only one — in Stamford Connecticut — ever opened, and that closed down in 2019 soon after it opened.

Capri, who has been detained without bail since his indictment, is slated to be sentenced in January on the same day as his mom, whose new name is Debbie Corvo. She admitted helping her son pull off a $794,000 bank fraud in 2019 when the feds were closing in on him and his funds were drying up. Corvo is slated to receive a "time served" sentence for her guilty plea to misprision of a felony.

Feds Want Ailing 87-Year-Old Wiseguy To Die Behind Bars, Not At Home

Victor OrenaThe warden at his prison hospital okayed a compassionate release for him in 2019, after he had served 27 years of a life sentence. But former acting Colombo boss Victor (Little Vic) Orena, who suffers a myriad of ailments including Alzheimer's disease, is still behind bars, and that's where federal prosecutors in Brooklyn want him to stay until he dies.

The prosecutors made that clear last week when they opposed Orena's release and equated the ailing 87-year-old mobster to the late Gambino boss John Gotti, and three other Mafia bosses who got 100 year prison terms in the Commission case and died in prison.

Assistant U.S. attorneys Devon Lash and Elizabeth Geddes wrote that Little Vic is in the same league as the late Dapper Don, as well as Luchese boss Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo, Genovese leader Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, and Carmine (Junior) Persico, who chose Orena as his acting boss in 1988.

The staggering prison terms "imposed on (those four) defendants convicted in connection with their leadership of a major organized crime family indicates Orena's sentence is not aberrant," the prosecutors stated in asking Brooklyn Federal Judge Eric Komitee to reject Orena's motion for an early release under provisions of the First Step Act of 2018.

Judge Eric KomiteeThe prosecutors wrote that Orena was convicted of heading a rebel faction in a bloody mob war that logged 12 fatalities — including three innocent bystanders — in the early 1990s. Little Vic was also found guilty of the 1989 murder of an underling whose body was dug up in 1991. And the feds say he also ordered the killing of an associate he blamed for the unearthing of the dead man's remains by the FBI.

"Orena's criminal conduct involved the ultimate violence, the taking of a human life," wrote Lash and Geddes. "Life in prison is a proportionate and just punishment for the defendant's crimes."

They wrote that trial Judge Jack Weinstein had stated that "considerations of incapacitation and general deterrence overwhelm all other factors in the sentencing of Orena," who had been fully enmeshed in a "net of criminal activity" for his entire adult life.

"In determining that a life sentence was appropriate here," the prosecutors wrote, "Judge Weinstein was aware that Orena would likely die in prison. The reasons behind Orena's life sentence are no less true today than they were at the time of his sentencing."

The prosecutors concede that Orena's "plethora of medical conditions" which are not listed in the public filings but include diabetes, heart disease and blindness — and require a full time aide — "arguably meet the threshold 'extraordinary and compelling reason' requirement" for his release. But they argue that his violent criminal history overrides and negates that requirement.

David SchoenAttorney David Schoen counters that the "extraordinary and compelling" reasons that support Little Vic's release are greater today than they were in 2019 when warden Stephen Spaulding approved Orena's release only to be overruled by a Bureau of Prisons official on the grounds that the sickly octogenarian wiseguy "would have posed a danger to the community."

Schoen wrote that Little Vic's "severely debilitated medical condition" that has gotten worse during the many years he has been incarcerated, combined with an official April 2021 BOP finding that the "level of risk" that Orena would pose to others upon his release was "minimum" — the "very lowest level of risk possible" — warrants compassion for his client.

The lawyer argued that "a sentence of time served" for Orena after he has spent "almost 30 years" behind bars, not only "provides just punishment" for his client. It "reflects the seriousness of the offense" and serves as a powerful deterrent for others to refrain from such conduct. It also "protects the public from further crimes of the defendant," Schoen wrote.

There is no need to keep him locked up until he dies, the lawyer argued.

Andrew Orena and Dad He implored Judge Komitee to send Orena home to his five sons, 20 grandchildren and four great-grandkids "who live for the moment he is released from prison and who are prepared to bring him home and provide a fully supportive loving home for him, addressing all of his mental health and physical condition needs."

In a letter that begged for "mercy for my father and my family," Orena's son Andrew told Judge Komitee that his ailing dad "is a shell of the man he once was." He pleaded for his father's release and a "happy ending" to a tragic "family saga" in which his father "lost everything he once had except his sons, grandchildren and great grandchildren."

His dad grew up without a father, Andrew Orena wrote. "He had a very troubled beginning" and was "lured into a life that both helped him and destroyed him," his son wrote. The Life wreaked havoc with his "two older brothers, John and Victor Jr. (who) followed in the same path" as their dad. They were convicted of racketeering and each spent time behind bars, Andrew wrote.

"I'm very proud to say," he wrote, that his "brothers left that life behind once they finished their incarceration" and "never associated with anyone from that past life nor got into any trouble since then. Justice was served, my brothers were rehabilitated. There is no connection to the former life."

"My father," Andrew wrote, "holds no risk to anyone, especially to me and my brothers. My father served close to 30 years. I plead to you for mercy for my father and my family that we can spend these final days with him, so we can love him, (and) care for him."

"We ask for a humane and compassionate decision to be made," wrote Orena's granddaughter Jacquelyn, who was told two years ago by her grandfather's case manager that he was going to be released only to learn soon after that the decision was overturned by the BOP. "Please release us from the life sentence our entire family has been serving for the past three decades," she wrote.

Slippery Scammers Skate Free After Paying $1.6 Million In Restitution

Philip OrlandoSeven years later, with help from a former top federal prosecutor who oversaw the historic 1985 Mafia Commission case, scores of New Yorkers have finally received $1.6 million in restitution they were promised from Philip and Anthony Orlando, two con men from Pelham, NY who ripped them off nearly two decades ago and got sweet no-jail sentences for their crimes.

That's because Bart Schwartz, the chief of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's criminal division in the 1980s, enabled the Orlando brothers to obtain a $1.3 million settlement from "one or more" high rollers from Westchester whom they had sued for money they insisted they were owed so they could satisfy the hefty judgement that had been pending against them since 2014.

How many of their 173 victims have lived long enough to collect any of the money that they lost to the duplicitous, double-dealing Orlando brothers back in 2002 and 2003 is anybody's guess. The feds are mum about that.

The Brooklyn Federal Court saga began in 2007 when Philip Orlando, 54, and his brother Anthony, 53, were arrested for stealing $2.8 million from 173 investors in a classic pump and dump stock scheme. It ended two weeks ago when prosecutors agreed with a push by their court appointed lawyers to toss probation violation charges, and Judge Frederic Block dismissed them.

Bart SchwartzDuring the 14 intervening years between then and now, the brothers cooperated with the feds and skated free, even though they failed to pay back the money they stole, as they had promised when they received their non-custodial sentence in 2014.

Meanwhile, a stock broker and a businessman whom the brothers snared in a made-up plot to steal $4 million served a year and a day prison terms and were forced to pay back the fruits of their crimes, a grand total of $26,610 — money they had gotten from the FBI.

Schwartz, whose company Guidepost Solutions currently monitors the NYC Housing Authority, had several roles in the long-running case, according to court filings.

His Manhattan law offices were a base of operations for the Orlando brothers during an FBI sting operation in 2011; he praised "Phil and Tony" Orlando for "the ethical way they approached business" at their 2014 sentencing, and this year, Schwartz gave their lawyer, Steven Kessler, the info they needed to get a settlement in a $10 million lawsuit.

In their suit, the brothers sought business records from Schwartz that they alleged would prove that Anthony Lanza, Kevin Keane, and Anthony Collura, three officials of Carriage House Partners LLC, (CHP) had cheated them out of millions of dollars the Orlandos had earned working for the company since 2014, the year they were sentenced.

Anthony OrlandoBack in June, Kessler told Gang Land that the Orlandos had made their peace with Schwartz, who had furnished the books and records that the brothers had sought.

None of the defense lawyers in the civil case would disclose which of their clients had ponied up the money for the Orlandos. CHP is a Delaware company that the Orlandos and Lanza formed in 2009, a year after the brothers had pleaded guilty and were cooperating with the feds.

In a filing on Monday, assistant U.S. attorney James McDonald stated that "one or more parties" who were sued by the Orlando brothers in December and who were "involved in mediation with the defendants, agreed to pay the entire amount of the restitution" and had done so in a wire transfer to the Court last month.

Neither McDonald nor John Marzulli, a spokesman for the office would identify the lawyer who had wired "the balance of the outstanding restitution" to the Court on behalf of the Orlandos.

Marzulli declined to comment on why the duo, who wer

[newera_212]

Good article this week. Thank you for posting.

Gioia really is a huge piece of shit. Unbelievable. All because he helped supposedly convict 70 people 25 years ago...who I'm sure a good chunk of which are back out free now anyway, committing more crimes.

I'm always curious how the restitution thing works. It seems some of these guys who commit (massive) financial crimes go away, and come back with some sort of restitution hanging over their heads, but always seem to be living decent. I'm thinking of Belfort for an example. I know he's done well with the social media grifting thing...selling courses, hosting a show, building a brand, all of that - but even before he optioned his life story for a movie or even wrote a book, he was out in Cali living better than most with an 8 figure restitution hanging over his head. Some of the other stock fraud guys seem to be like that too? Cash poor with assets in other people's names? I just don't understand. Is the restitution determined by a calculated percentage of your gross income each year or something?

Something tells me Gioia's going to circle back around in a couple years and be living well

[Tonyd621]

Goia had a license to steal. I'm glad he's doing some jail time. But I bet the feds want potential cooperators to see the deal Goia gets when you roll.

[jimmy_beans8]

Great point...also?? ,,,,how those guys all end up in Arizona?

[Tonyd621]

They should let Orena out. I mean if a BOP administrator said he's not a threat then let him out. These prosecutors don't care about justice. They just want their names in gangland for being pricks

[Pogo The Clown]

Yeah poor Orena. He only killed like 29 people. It is an injustice to keep him in prison.


Pogo

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for posting.

5yrs for Gioia is a farce. $64mil fraud.
Scarfo Jnr got 30yrs for a $12mil bust out.

Consistency

[furiofromnaples]

Thanks for posting.

5yrs for Gioia is a farce. $64mil fraud.
Scarfo Jnr got 30yrs for a $12mil bust out.

Consistency

Gioia jointed the Team America,Scarfo jr not. But by the way Gravano killed 19 men anf the Feds gave him a golden watch.

[furiofromnaples]

Yeah poor Orena. He only killed like 29 people. It is an injustice to keep him in prison.


Pogo

During the Orena war died 4 innocents only for this he deserve to die in prison.if he killed only mobsters should be a problem to free a almost blind relic.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Gioia jointed the Team America,Scarfo jr not.

And he received consideration for his guilty plea in 1995.
It doesn't give him lifetime leniency in future crimes he committed.

[furiofromnaples]

Gioia jointed the Team America,Scarfo jr not.

And he received consideration for his guilty plea in 1995.
It doesn't give him lifetime leniency in future crimes he committed.

Im agree with you. But the judge gave him a light sentence.

[Shellackhead]

Crazy how you can tell the quality guys from before have over the guys from today, who in the Lucchese family is able to make scheme that’ll bring in that much money?

[Ivan]

Yeah poor Orena. He only killed like 29 people. It is an injustice to keep him in prison.

He's responsible for innocent people getting killed. I really don't care if these guys kill each other but I draw the line with that.

[Dave65827]

Crazy how you can tell the quality guys from before have over the guys from today, who in the Lucchese family is able to make scheme that’ll bring in that much money?

Well this guy did flip and pretty much had immunity with no law enforcement pressure compared to today . If he hadn’t had joined team America he would’ve gotten 30 like scarfo jr who did a similar scam

[Shellackhead]

Yeah poor Orena. He only killed like 29 people. It is an injustice to keep him in prison.

He's responsible for innocent people getting killed. I really don't care if these guys kill each other but I draw the line with that.

Who did Vic Orena come up under/around? You happen to know?