GL News 04/07/2022

[AnIrishGuy]

Feds: Gambino Gangster Killed Luchese Loanshark Over $750,000 Debt

On the morning that he was shot to death in his Brooklyn home, Luchese loanshark Vincent Zito was glad to see his old buddy Anthony Pandrella arrive at the door bright and early at 8:10 AM. That was because Pandrella, a burly Gambino gangster, had promised to bring Zito the balance of the $750,000 he owed him.

That's what two key prosecution witnesses, including one who is a "close relative" of Zito's, are expected to tell the jury when they take the witness stand at Pandrella's long-delayed murder trial that is scheduled to begin in Brooklyn Federal Court next month, prosecutors say.
The two unidentified witnesses, as well as a longtime customer of the murdered 78-year-old gangster, will testify that several months before he was killed in October, 2018, Zito had stated that he had given $750,000 of his loanshark bank to Pandrella for "safekeeping" after he had told Zito that he was "hot," or under investigation by the law, the prosecutors stated in a court filing last week.

Before he was killed, the prosecutors wrote, Zito told his relative that when he asked for his money back, Pandrella told Zito that the money had somehow "gone missing" from his house. Pandrella had repaid an unspecified portion of the money, Zito told his relative, and he had promised to repay some more of the money on October 26, 2018 when he visited Zito at his home that morning. A second witness, who appears from his expected testimony to be a friend, will testify that "the day before Zito was killed, (he) "had breakfast with Zito, during which Zito told (him) that Pandrella was supposed to come to Zito's house the next day to give him the money that (he) owed Zito," the prosecutors wrote.
Two months earlier, the same witness had learned about the missing $750,000, wrote prosecutors Kristin Mace and Matthew Galeotti. That happened, they wrote, when he drove to Pandrella's home with Zito "because he had to pick something up" there and he "waited in the car" while Zito went into Pandrella's home. When Zito returned, the prosecutors wrote, Zito said, "I gave him $750,000 and he said it's gone. The fat fuck stole my money." Zito subsequently told the same man, the prosecutors wrote, that sometime later, Pandrella had brought him a portion of the money he was owed, but that Zito "knew that it was not the money he had given Pandrella because Zito always put distinctive marks on the bills on the top of each bundle that he used for loansharking, and this money was missing those markings."

Mace and Galeotti wrote that Zito's statements about giving Pandrella $750,000 "to hold for safekeeping," and other details he uttered about his loansharking business, along with a cash-counting machine found at his home, were evidence that they are entitled to use to prove a robbery-murder charge against Pandrella.
The prosecutors also plan to use the testimony of two loanshark customers to corroborate what they argue is Pandrella's primary motive for killing Zito: to "extinguish his debt to Zito."
One loanshark customer who might otherwise be a suspect in the murder, since he was paying Zito $1500 a week interest on a $226,000 loan, will testify that "Zito told him he had given Pandrella $750,000 to hold for safekeeping," according to the prosecutors. "At some point," the prosecutors added, "Pandrella told Zito that the box containing the money had gone missing from Pandrella's basement."
Another loanshark customer will tell the jury that Zito usually "had the money on hand in the house." But when he "attempted to borrow money from Zito in August 2018, it took Zito several days to fill the request," the prosecutors wrote
"I've got a problem," Zito told him, and then explained that he had been keeping his money at someone else's house. "When he tried to retrieve it, Zito was told by the man that he could not find it," the prosecutors wrote.
Zito "was angry" and told the customer he himself had "looked in the basement of the house but could not find the money," the prosecutors wrote. But the embittered loanshark did tell this customer that "Pandrella said that he planned to sell a piece of property to repay Zito."
Another reason for the crime, the prosecutors told Chief Judge Margo Brodie in their 35 page filing, was Pandrella's fear that Zito was going to kill him.

That's the motive that jurors are expected to learn about from another unidentified witness, who appears to have been a friend of Zito's and an associate of his alleged killer, according to the information the prosecutors provided about him.
This witness had been in Zito's Sheepshead Bay home and knew that "expensive watches" Zito had "in a display case" there "were collateral for a loan Zito had given to a borrower" and had known that Zito had given Pandrella money to hold for safekeeping, the prosecutors wrote.
Several weeks after Zito had told his friend, whom they refer to as Witness-4, "that Zito was very angry about the money that Pandrella was supposed to have held for him," the prosecutors wrote, the witness went to dinner with both men and a group of others.
"During the dinner," the prosecutors wrote, "Zito, who was sitting directly across from Pandrella and within Pandrella's earshot, looked directly at Witness-4 and said that he was going to kill Pandrella when he collected the money from him."
Pandrella took steps to make sure that never happened, the prosecutors told Brodie, in a pithy and succinct sentence that describes their theory of why Vincent Zito, who had been a loanshark for 50 years, was found shot to death on the living room floor of his home by his 11-year-old grandson when he got home from school shortly before 3 PM on that fateful day.

"On the morning of October 26, 2018," the prosecutors wrote, "Pandrella robbed Zito's business of the expensive watches that had been posted as collateral and killed Vincent Zito, eliminating Zito as a threat, and making it impossible for Zito to recover the loansharking money."
In addition to detailing other evidence they plan to use at trial, including the autopsy report about Zito's death, findings that Pandrella's DNA was found on the murder weapon, and video of him arriving and leaving the locked Zito home at 10:23 that morning, the prosecutors asked Brodie to block several defense arguments that Pandrella's lawyer James Froccaro is sure to oppose.
They want her to prevent Froccaro from introducing evidence or arguing that an "alternative perpetrator" killed Zito without first establishing that the unknown killer had a "sufficient nexus to the crimes charged," or in other words, unless the lawyer essentially identifies the guy who did it and proves why he did it beyond a reasonable doubt.
They also want to preclude Froccaro "from mentioning" at any time during the trial that the 62-year-old Pandrella has no prior arrests, or introducing any "evidence of the defendant’s good character" to counter their plans to have a witness they identify as John Doe testify that Pandrella once used a gun to threaten him to repay a $5000 loan he had given Doe.
The defense lawyer was scheduled to respond tomorrow but yesterday he asked Judge Brodie for an additional week to file his reply.
Pandrella, who faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted, has been hospitalized for about six weeks now for treatment for diabetes that he suffers. His trial is scheduled to begin on May 16.

$64 Million Later, FBI-DEA Snitch Frank Gioia Jr. Is Broke; His Mom Is Going To Lake Como

We knew Frank Gioia Jr. got a great plea deal last year — five years for a crime that called for 33 years in prison. But the turncoat Luchese mobster, who admitted running a bust-out scam that stole $64 million from victims across the country, got an even better deal than what was revealed at the time of his guilty plea, Gang Land has learned.
For one thing, Gioia — who was jailed as a flight risk in 2020 due to the millions of dollars in cash and other assets the feds claimed he possessed — is eligible to be placed in a halfway house next year. Also, although Gioia faced fines up to $350,000, his sentencing judge ruled that he is now indigent, and did not impose any fine.

And in yet another big break that must have been especially meaningful to the ex-mobster, his mom, who helped him pull off his scheme from their new home base in Arizona, landed a no-jail sentence. She is getting ready for a trip to Italy.
The decision to grant Gioia considerable breaks came during a secret sentencing proceeding.
At the session, Phoenix Federal Court Judge John Tucci found that the ex-mobster, who was charged as Frank Capri, the name Gioia adopted after he entered the Witness Security Program, is in such bad financial shape that he will be allowed to pay off the mandatory $200 judicial assessment fee he owes the court in four monthly installments of $50. And those payments won't begin until 60 days after poor Gioia-Capri is released from prison.
Gioia also got permission to skip the court session next month when his lawyer and prosecutors are slated to discuss the $19.5 million in restitution and taxes he agreed to pay — money he can't ante up because he's broke. What happened to the cash and assets that included "artwork and jewelry, including loose diamonds" that Gioia-Capri's family members stored for him, according to court filings, and how the indigent defendant is going to repay the $19.5 million, remains a mystery.
As for his mom, the former Mrs. Gioia, now known as Debbie Corvo, was fined $2000 last month for helping her son fleece scores of victims from Cleveland to California from 2008 to 2017, and sentenced to a year of supervised release. She'll be in sunny Lake Como next month for the destination wedding of her granddaughter, with approval from the government.

Gioia-Capri, 55 won't be attending either event. He had told Judge Tucci that he wanted to attend the May 5 court session regarding his debts, but he changed his mind about that "upon reflection and after consultation with counsel," according to his court-appointed attorney Stephen Wallin.
Gang Land could not learn whether the daughter of the ex-gangster, or his sister, who entered the federal witness program with Gioia and settled in the Scottsdale-Phoenix area, is getting married. But grandma Corvo will attend her granddaughter's May 22 wedding in the gorgeous resort area in northern Italy near the Swiss border, according to court filings in the case.
In seeking permission from Judge Tucci for Corvo to be in Lake Como for the wedding, attorney Kurt Altman wrote that "like any grandmother," his client "is simply a grandmother that wants to attend her granddaughter's wedding." He argued that his 70-year-old client wasn't "a flight risk or a danger" and noted that prosecutor Monica Klapper had signed off on the request.

Unlike her brother and her mom, Gioia-Capri's sister has not been charged with any wrongdoing in the case. But according to an affidavit by an IRS agent, she "kept some of the diamonds in the event Capri needed to access them at a later time." The sister could not be reached, and lawyers for her brother and mother, as well as the prosecutor, did not return calls or declined to comment about any aspects of the case.
In response to a motion to unseal the minutes of Capri's sentencing by lawyers for the Arizona Republic, which broke the story in 2017 that Gioia had reinvented himself as a major scam artist, Tucci has stated he will publicly file a redacted transcript of the sentencing before next month's scheduled restitution hearing. Both sides submitted edited versions to the judge last week.
Like all the court sessions Capri has had, that proceeding, as well as the sentencing memos that he and the government filed, were initially sealed in an effort to guard against any official notice that before he showed up in Arizona two decades ago, he was an FBI-DEA snitch who helped the feds convict 70 mobsters and drug dealers, as well as a cop killer in the 1990s.

It took the feds nearly three years, but in February of 2020, the IRS and U.S. Attorney's office turned a blockbuster story by reporter Robert Anglen about Gioia-Capri's huge bust out scam into a fraud indictment that led to the convictions of the ex-New York mobster and his mom, but so far, has not been able to recover much, if any, of the stolen loot for their victims.
Much, if not all, of the $12,997,478 in funds that he admitting stealing and using "to purchase luxury vehicles, expensive real estate, and jewelry" between 2011 and 2015 instead of building and opening new Toby Keith's I Love This Bar & Grill restaurants seems to have disappeared, according to the Judge Tucci's finding that Gioia-Capri is broke.

The same goes for the $5,035,225 in funds that he stole and used for his own aggrandizement from 2015 to 2017 instead of building the second group of "branded restaurants that never opened," those named for the country music group Rascal Flatts, according to Gioia-Capri's remarks when he pleaded guilty in August of last year.*

Mob Turncoat Turned Podcaster Faces The Music Tomorrow

Gene Borrello, the gangster-turned-snitch-turned-podcaster is slated to be sentenced tomorrow for violating his post-prison supervised release for the second time in less than two years. Chances are that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, who went along with a four month prison term the first time Borello broke the rules, are this time going to ask for a substantially longer stretch behind bars.

Borrello faces up to five years in prison. And while the U.S. Attorney's Office is not going to seek that much time for a supervised release violation, (VOSR) a request for a guidelines sentence of up to 14 months, or more, for the two violations he was charged with in July, and that he admitted in November, looms as a real possibility.

Borrello, 36, pleaded guilty to lodging an online threat against the husband of his ex-girlfriend. It was the second time he had copped to the offense, although this time he did it on Instagram. He also admitted to discussing mob doings on YouTube, a move that violated the conditions of his prior supervised release stint.

The feds did not push to send him right back to prison, but it's clear that Borrello and the feds have disagreed on the severity of those repeat violations, and how much prison time he should receive.
Usually, when a defendant agrees to plead guilty to a VOSR, the sentence is also worked out, and is imposed during the same proceeding. That is what occurred a year ago, when Borrello pleaded guilty to threatening the hubby of his ex-gal pal, and to associating with ex-cons while serving as a cohost of a podcast with another ex-con, John Alite.
In April 2021, Judge Frederic Block imposed an agreed-upon term of four months, and banned Borrello from participating in any "podcasts, radio, or internet shows that discuss organized crime" during a new three year period of supervised release that began when he was released from prison in June of last year.

Block noted that Borrello had "a bad track record" and advised him not to screw up again. The judge warned him that his sentencing that day was most likely the "last break" he was going to get. Next time, Block warned, he could be put "in jail for a long, long time."
Within a month, however, Borrello violated those restrictions, and was hit with the two violations that he admitted in November.
Since then, Borrello has been allowed to remain free while the allegations were pending, and after he pleaded guilty.
His attorney, Nancy Ellis, filed her sentencing request on his behalf under seal. In response to a Gang Land request to unseal the filing, Ellis disclosed that that she sealed it, in part, "based upon . . . the pervasive and persistent public interest in Mr. Borrello's fate (including continuous probing by such organizations as (Gangland News)."

In an email reply to the Court, Ellis accused Gang Land of having engaged in a campaign "to disparage, denigrate, deride and discredit Mr. Borrello to an uncommon degree" since his release from prison in 2019 and she believed that "that whatever (she) wrote would become a source of ridicule, scorn and derision" in Gang Land if her memo were publicly filed.
As a result, Ellis told Judge Block, she will withdraw her filing on Borrello's behalf if Judge Block orders her to unseal it, as is required under a slew of judicial precedents holding that all filings in criminal cases are to be public, except for extraordinary reasons, generally involving the safety of individuals.

The decision by the court-appointed lawyer to forego a plea for leniency on behalf of her client for fear of scorn or ridicule by Gang Land seems like an inapprorpriate reaction by Ennis, especially since Borrello's former friends at the U.S. Attorney's office are looking to put him behind bars again.
No matter what, though, Judge Block, generally a lenient sentencing jurist, will have the final say on Borrello's fate.

[Sittite]

Thanks for the post…

[Cheech]

Gene aint the brightest fucking bulb.

[Dave65827]

Pandrella is fucked… I wonder who the associate giving testimony is

[Wiseguy]

I don't even want to think what you or I would do to remove that debt.

[TommyGambino]

Was always curious if the Gambino family ordered this because Pandrella called his captain George lombardozzi several times before the hit but doesn't look to be the case

[Tonyd621]

Is anybody else surprised like I am that Zitos book was possibly in the million(s)? I mean the 750k I'm sure that not all of his money was given to one person. Maybe, Zito was on the endangered species list for not kicking up or something or he knew something was up...why would you whack him out at his house unless you knew he wouldn't leave and that was the only way to get to him?

[TallGuy19]

At what point is it cheaper for him to settle it another way?

[TallGuy19]

Does anyone know how Zito was connected to the Luccheses? Was he on record with someone?

[TommyNoto]

$750,000 is a very nice size book that’s kicks up a lot of cash

What was this guy thinking giving anyone that amount of $ ?

Kind of shows loansharking is still a big cash biz today for wiseguys

[Dave65827]

Idk if this is related but Zito was where involved in a scam charity in the late 90s . I think there’s even footage of them being chased by the news
It was big scandal I think as Giulianis administration helped fund their scam homeless shelter

I think this is where he probably got his money for his big book as I can’t find any other stuff besides his murder

[TallGuy19]

Idk if this is related but Zito was where involved in a scam charity in the late 90s . I think there’s even footage of them being chased by the news
It was big scandal I think as Giulianis administration helped fund their scam homeless shelter

I think this is where he probably got his money for his big book as I can’t find any other stuff besides his murder

That was Anthony Zito, an associate of Vic Amuso.

"The Conca D’Oro — long thought of as a quick-sheets motel and a haven for drug dealers — offered cheap housing to indigent families throughout the 1980s.

Macaluso later sold the site and it became a homeless shelter in the early 1990s when it was leased by Brooklyn-based Angels by the Sea.

The city put a freeze on referrals to the shelter in 1997 while it investigated an alleged organized crime link with Angels by the Sea, which operated another shelter in Brooklyn.

Charges included allegations that convicted felon Anthony Zito, head of the outfit that owned the building which housed the Brooklyn facility, was a business associate of an alleged underboss of the Lucchese crime family.

Zito was convicted in 1971 of extortion and in 1992 was accused of being “a partner in the shelter with Vittorio Amuso, who the authorities alleged was the boss of the Lucchese crime family,” according to the New York Times."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.silive ... utType=amp

[Dave65827]

Shit sorry little disoriented over here

Still it’s interesting where he got this cash to be giving this amount of cash

[TallGuy19]

Shit sorry little disoriented over here

Still it’s interesting where he got this cash to be giving this amount of cash

Apparently Anthony and Vincent were brothers, so yeah, that probably is where their money came from.

[SonnyBlackstein]

Thanks for the post.

Zito giving another gangster 750k. What could possibly go wrong?

Pandrella is half retarded. Go to your capo, give him 250k of the 750 and have him outsource a hit on Zito. How hard is that. He wasnt a friend. Your Capo is happy, and youve got half a bar. Now hes fucked. Hopefully his family have the 750. At least its something.

Surprised Zito wasnt made with that size book. Must have turned it down. Pandrella obviously a brokester at 68 and still on record. Zito shouldve picked up on that as a red flag.