Gang Land Sep 8 2022

[chin_gigante]

A Birthday Cake For Mob Boss Barney Bellomo – Even As A Gaggle Of His Genovese Gangsters Are Busted

He's the most powerful Mafia boss in the country, the leader of the Genovese crime family, the so-called Ivy League of Organized Crime. Liborio (Barney) Bellomo has prospered as other bosses have faded away. One reason for his mob success? He stays rigorously beneath the radar.

But in a rare photo, obtained exclusively by Gang Land, the mob kingpin is seen celebrating his 65th birthday earlier this year, in an arms-around photo with several top members of his brugad.

Sources say the party took place on the weekend of January 8 at Gigante in Eastchester, a four-year-old upscale Italian ristorante run by Louis Gigante, a nephew of Vincent (Chin) Gigante, the late Genovese boss. The locale is appropriate since it was the legendary Chin Gigante who singled out Bellomo as a smart, up and coming mobster and tabbed him as his acting boss back in 1989. That was when the wily Chin learned he was likely to be hit with racketeering charges linked to the mob's control of the windows replacement industry in NYC housing projects.

That's Barney, second from the right, looking stern but proud in a fashionable black mock turtleneck. His birthday celebrating pals, from left to right, are Michael (Mickey) Ragusa, whom the FBI has carried for years as the family's "street boss;" capo Pasquale (Uncle Patty) Falcetti, Bellomo, and Ralph (The Undertaker) Balsamo. The fellow between Ragusa and Falcetti, whose face is hidden by the happy face, is "a long time friend of Barney's" who is an unconnected "regular guy," according to the source who provided the photo to Gang Land.

While Bellomo himself keeps rolling along and has managed to stay out of trouble, some of the smiles on his team likely faded in recent months as the feds busted a gaggle of Genovese members and associates.

With major help from state prosecutors, federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn were able to file racketeering indictments against eleven family gangsters, including three capos who've allegedly been running lucrative gambling and loansharking rackets for Bellomo, and sending thousands of dollars up the chain to their family boss each month.

Among those charged are Balsamo, a Bronx-based mobster and longtime Bellomo pal.

In April, the feds in Manhattan hit Balsamo, 51, and another capo who hails from The Bronx, Nicholas (Nicky Slash) Calisi, 63, with racketeering for overseeing a Genovese family gambling and loansharking operation. The racket allegedly goes back to 2011, when Bellomo completed his post-prison supervised release from three racketeering convictions that kept him behind bars from 1996 to 2008.

Last month, prosecutors in Brooklyn charged capo Carmelo (Carmine Pizza) Polito, 63, and three underlings with running several Genovese family gambling parlors on Long Island after a four-year-probe by the Nassau DA's office, the NYPD, FBI, U.S. Department of Labor and the Waterfront Commission.

Ragusa, 57, Falcetti, 63, and Bellomo were all codefendants in a 2002 labor racketeering case with Chin Gigante and his son Andrew that stemmed from rackets the crime family operated on the New Jersey piers through their control over the scandal tarred International Longshoremen's Association.

Like Barney, Mickey Ragusa, whose brother Joseph is an official of the Metro Marine Contractors Association and a Metro trustee of the Metro-ILA pension fund, and Uncle Patty, a close pal of ILA international president Harold Daggett, copped plea deals rather than contest the charges at trial.

Conspicuous by his absence from the party, and the picture, is Ernest (Ernie) Muscarella, who was a codefendant in the 2002 case, and is a powerhouse Bronx-based mobster whom the FBI lists as the crime family's official underboss.

Whatever title you give him, sources on both sides of the law agree that Muscarella, 79, is Barney's "main man" on the street and runs the crime family for Bellomo. Sources say Ernie serves a similar but less visible "up front" boss role that Peter (Petey Red) DiChiara served for Barney until he died in 2018. DiChiara had a social club, but the sources say that Muscarella doesn't, at least not one that Gang Land's sources know about.

"Ernie is running the show," said one reliable underworld source, who was unaware that Bellomo had thrown a 65th birthday party that Muscarella did not attend, but insisted: "Ernie is Barney's main man on the street. Ernie doesn't go to any gatherings."

Muscarella, who was sentenced to five years behind bars in the 2002 case, a year more than Bellomo, was released from prison the same year as Barney, in 2008. And like his boss, Ernie has avoided any further problems with the law since then. And sources say the boss and underboss duo rarely meet where prying eyes and ears can see or hear them.

"Barney doesn't socialize with Ernie," said the source who provided Gang Land the birthday party photo. Barney has a "different" relationship with Ernie than "he does with these guys," he continued. "These are guys from the neighborhood. He knows them since they are all young kids. And when I mean socialize I'm talking vacations, dinners, and parties."

Gang Land disclosed that Bellomo had succeeded Gigante as the crime family's official boss six years ago, but some sources say that could have happened a year or three earlier.

As he closes in on a decade as the leader of the so-called Ivy League of Organized Crime, though, Barney is virtually an "invisible man" to the reduced contingent of FBI agents and other law enforcers who monitor the goings on of the crime family, as well as the overwhelming majority of the world of organized crime.

A widower, whose wife died from cancer in 2013, Bellomo has four children and owns a handful of homes in Westchester with family members, according to Property Shark, the online real estate database.

But Barney lives in the Bronx, on City Island, not in a tony suburban enclave, according to the source who unearthed the picture of Bellomo and his inner circle. "He's still the same old Barney," said the source. "He has nothing is in his name, don't waste your time looking," he said. "Not a car, not a lease, not a place where he lives."

In the federal racketeering case in Manhattan, Genovese mobsters John Campanella, 47, and Michael Messina, 69, and father and son associates, Thomas, 64, and Michael Poli, 37, are also charged with capos Balsamo and Calisi. The case was brought to the feds by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and the NY State Organized Crime Task Force following a joint two year probe.

The next status conference in the case is scheduled in October.

In the racketeering case in Brooklyn, Polito, soldier Joseph Macario, 68, and associates Salvatore (Sal the Shoemaker) Rubino, 58, Joseph Rutigliano, 53, and Mark Feuer, 59, are charged with running gambling parlors in Lynbrook, Merrick and West Babylon from 2012 until January of the year, the same month, coincidentally, when Bellomo celebrated his 65th. The defendants in the Brooklyn case are slated to appear in court next week.

Editor's Note: The other day, Gang Land was a guest on The View from Mulberry Street, a podcast hosted by veteran defense lawyer Mathew Mari, who penned a guest Gang Land column back in February.

The Feds: It Was Patricide In A Bronx McDonald's Drive Thru; Defense: It Was An Old-Fashioned Robbery-Murder

His lawyers say Anthony Zottola is not a "monster" who ordered the "unthinkable" murder of his mob-connected father. Neither, they say, is he the ghoul who plotted the shooting of his own brother. Instead, the lawyers argued in Brooklyn Federal Court this week, he is but a victim of the ruthless street gang leader Bushawn (Shelz) Shelton.

Anthony Zottola, his lawyers insisted, had hoped Shelton would protect him from mobsters who had terrorized his father all his life. Instead, Shelton betrayed him and his entire family, attorney Ilana Haramati declared at the start of Zottola's murder-for-hire trial.

Prosecutors acknowledge that Zottola "didn't pick up a gun or wield a knife." But they said that he set in motion and orchestrated the 2018 murder of his father Sylvester (Sally Daz) Zottola, a killing conducted as his dad was "in the drive-through lane of a McDonald's" restaurant. His motive, according to the government, was that "he wanted control of the family multi-million-dollar real estate business" and he "paid others to do his dirty work for him."

The defense denied it. "Anthony Zottola did not plot to kill his father" or "harm his brother," lawyer Haramati told jurors in her opening remarks. "Bushawn Shelton and his street crew did that" after Shelton used what Zottola thought was a new-found friendship and a "business" relationship "to rob, terrorize and murder Anthony's family, the lawyer said.

Haramati said Zottola acquired a distrust and fear of the mob growing up as a "child of Sally Daz" in Pelham Bay. She noted that his father Sylvester's mob handle stemmed from the illegal gambling business he ran and that he had to pay shadowy Bronx mobsters like Vincent Basciano, with the "colorful name, Vinny Gorgeous" to succeed.

But when he and his dad needed help, they didn't get it, she said. That happened when her client was a 13-year-old boy, Haramati said, after Sally Daz picked him up at summer school and stopped by his Joker-Poker warehouse where they "were brutally beaten" by robbers until his dad agreed to open the safe that "was full of cash."

"Even though he saw his 13-year old son get beaten to a pulp," Haramati said, "Sally Daz never separated from his gangster life," noting that Sally Daz and his son Salvatore continued to operate DAZ Amusements and the illegal gambling business until the day Daz was murdered.

"The evidence will show," the lawyer said, that "Sylvester Zottola was murdered" after he had picked up the cash from a gambling location at 167th Street and Clay Avenue, and that three months earlier, his son Salvatore was shot and wounded after he picked up cash from the same Joker Poker location.

"The evidence is going to show that Anthony and Shelton got into business together" after they were introduced by a tenant in one of the homes his father owned, she said, Her client "thought that Shelton could provide" his family protection from the Mafia, "on the changing streets of the Bronx," the lawyer said.

But "Anthony badly misjudged his so-called friend," and learned that Shelton was "part of the very same dangerous street culture that had led to only danger and destruction of Anthony's family," said Haramati, insisting that jurors would see no evidence that Zottola had hired Shelton "to commit this unthinkable crime" and that her client was "not guilty" of murder for hire.

Assistant U.S. attorney Devon Lash had a much different take on the case against Zottola and the two Bloods gangsters who went to trial for the murder of Sally Daz on October 4, 2018 – the alleged triggerman Himan (Ace) Ross and the accused get-away driver Alfred (Aloe) Lopez.

"In the last year of his life," the 71-year-old longtime mob associate never knew that he was hunted and beaten and stabbed and almost shot by gangsters who had been hired to kill him by "his youngest son Anthony," Lash stated in her opening remarks to the jury.

Over the years, Sally Daz used the $8000 to $10,000 a month he earned from the illegal gambling business he ran to purchase and build a real estate empire that included dozens of rental properties in the Bronx worth an estimated $40 to $45 million that his son Anthony, and to a lesser degree, his son Salvatore helped him run, Lash told the jurors.

"Although both sons helped their father," the prosecutor stated, it was very clear that Sally Daz, "was the boss." He had built homes for his three children, and had been generous with them, but "he was in charge" of the real estate empire. "He built the business. He started the business. He decided where the money went."

That didn't sit right with his son Anthony though, she said.

"Over the course of this trial," she told the jurors "the evidence will show that Anthony Zottola wanted control over the family real estate business" and "you'll see and hear evidence that Anthony believed his father and his brother were in his way" and his "solution was a criminal one: He decided to kill them both."

Two minutes after his father was killed, Lash told the jury, "Anthony found out his father was likely dead" when he "received a panicked phone call from his father's girlfriend who said she heard gunshots while on the phone with him and she called and called but he didn't answer."

Four minutes after the murder, she continued, "Ross texts Shelton: Done."

Seven minutes after the murder, she stated, "Shelton replied: Copy."

Eight minutes after the murder, Shelton texted Zottola: "Can we party today or tomorrow?"

Nine minutes after the murder, Zottola replied, "Tomorrow."

A few minutes later Zottola added, "It's my little man's B-day. I'm taking him to his favorite place, McDonald's, then a movie. LOL. Like I eat that stuff. Thank you for being a great friend." Thirteen minutes after the murder, Lash told the jury, "Shelton replied to Anthony: 'Hey, it's like it's your birthday today as well. LOL.'"

The next day, Lash continued, "you'll see evidence that Anthony paid Shelton tens of thousands of dollars. You'll see that defendants Ross and Lopez also received a payout. Ross displayed large sums of money on his Instagram account in the days following the murder. Defendant Lopez upgraded his Ford Fusion for a BMW."

Within days of his father's death, "Anthony took control of the family real estate business," the prosecutor said. "He changed the company name. He decided where the money went. He was finally in charge."

That control he had sought and obtained ended the following June, when he was arrested and locked up, where prosecutors hope he will remain, at the conclusion of his six-to-eight week trial, if the jury pronounces him guilty of the murder-for-hire of his dad.

Government Witness Salvatore Zottola Backs Up One Claim Of His Accused Killer Brother

Salvatore Zottola, the government's leadoff witness at the trial of his brother Anthony, backed up a defense claim yesterday that Anthony opted to work in his father's real estate business because he and his dad were beaten during a robbery of his illegal gambling business and not because of a long range plan to kill his father to take control of his $45 million real estate empire.

Salvatore, who along with his mob-linked dad, Sylvester (Sally Daz) Zottola, were victims of a murder-for-hire plot that Anthony allegedly concocted with Bloods leader Bushawn (Shelz) Shelton, testified that he had texted his brother in July of 2017, a few months before the alleged plot to kill Salvatore and Sally Daz began, regarding a robbery of his father and a beating that Anthony and their dad had suffered in 1991.

Brooklyn Federal Judge Hector Gonzalez initially agreed with an objection by prosecutor Kayla Bensing that the 26-year-old incident, if it happened, was irrelevant, but changed his ruling after defense attorney Henry Mazurek agued that the issue was relevant to the charges in the case because the robbery-beating undermined the government's motive about the alleged murder-for-hire plot.

"Anthony specifically divorced himself from the illegal business because he didn't want to be involved with it because it had the threat of violence," Mazurek said. "The government wants to make it seem" he argued, "that Anthony is only in the real estate business because he wants all the money."

"That's part of their motive evidence and what they spent a long time on direct examination, saying, 'He's there for control of the real estate and to push everybody out. That's why he's in the real estate business.'

"Part of the reason he's in the real estate business," said Mazurek, "and not the other business is because of this event that happened to him."

Gonzalez permitted the lawyer to ask Salvatore if he recalled an incident in 1991 that caused his brother Anthony to decide not to be involved in the vending machine business.

"Yes," Salvatore replied.

Following another objection to Mazurek's follow up query, Gonzalez asked: "Do you have personal knowledge of the event? Did you witness the event?

"I didn't witness it. I know about it," said Salvatore.

"Did you see him immediately after?" asked Mazurek.

"I remember him pulling up to the house with my father, yes."

Q "And what did you witness, what did you observe?"

A "This was 30 years ago. I observed that my father walked in with something on his head and my brother was very quiet. And I don't remember exactly what was said, but I know what happened."

After Gonzalez overruled another government objection, Salvatore testified that he "did text" his brother on either July 24 or July 25 of 2017 "and tell him it was an anniversary of some sort of that day."

Q. "Anniversary of an event that happened to him?"
A. "That day."
Q. "Twenty-six years ago."
A. "Yes."
Q. "At least as of 2017."
A. "That's correct."
Q. "And it wasn't just something that happened to him, it was him and his dad, correct?
A. "Correct."

[chin_gigante]

The photos Eboli posted making their way into Gang Land:

bellomo-liborio-2022.jpg

ragusa, x, falcetti, barney, balsamo-2022.jpg

Muscarella running the family as official underboss could confirm that Ragusa's street boss role is more of a messenger, which would line up with him being someone Bellomo is happy to socialise with.

[TommyGambino]

Photos obtained exclusively by gangland he reads this forum daily

[JohnnyS]

Good gangland this week thanks for posting. Interesting details on the Genovese administration. So Muscarella runs the family for Barney and Ragusa is in more of a messenger role. Capeci had previously reported that Barney had took over as official boss in around 2015 but its possible he took over earlier. My guess is he was elevated to official boss once he was off supervised release which was around 2012 or 2013. It's clear he was the heir to chin and they were saving that seat for him.

Also, I wonder how long Muscarella has been the underboss. https://www.masslive.com/news/2012/04/e ... be_in.html This article claims he was the official underboss while in prison with Emilio Fusco.

[Sittite]

Nothing about Grande getting sentenced???

[Ryan98366]

Nothing about Grande getting sentenced???

I’m waiting for that too. Fat Dom Grande going to the big house is going to be interesting. His new wife is a piece of ass….I feel bad for the guy leaving her behind.

[AntComello]

The whole zattola situation just gets weirder and weirder.

[Ryan98366]

Photos obtained exclusively by gangland he reads this forum daily

I wonder how many times Capeci’s sources are the top posters on this board: Pogo, B. , Chris Christie, Chin Gigante etc.


Hey Jerry! What is your username here?

[NYNighthawk]

Can you get in as a spectator to the Zottolla trial going on in Brooklyn federal Court. That's the same courthouse where you had to get there at 6:00am to get into the Gotti trial. And then you were saved a seat for after lunch!

[OcSleeper]

Nothing about Grande getting sentenced???

According to Schratwieser it was pushed back for 2 months. So we'll hear something about it in October.

[sharpieone]

Never heard that Barney lives on City Island before.

[SonnyBlackstein]

"Last month, prosecutors in Brooklyn charged capo Carmelo (Carmine Pizza) Polito, 63, and three underlings with running several Genovese family gambling parlors on Long Island after a four-year-probe by the Nassau DA's office, the NYPD, FBI, U.S. Department of Labor and the Waterfront Commission."

5 agencies. What, 50, 60 people? To catch 10 people in a gambling in ring.
Great priorities.

Good to hear clarification on Muscarella/Ragusa.
Wonder if Vincent Esposito was at the party.

Thanks for the post.

[NYNighthawk]

Never heard that Barney lives on City Island before.

Barney lives in Pelham Manor which is a sotne's throw from City Island.

[NYNighthawk]

Now if barney ever does get pinched who takes over? The Undertaker?

[moneyman]

Crazy that Ragusa’s brother is chairman of an ILA union. Devita, Dagget, Ragusa etc these guys have so many connections to the ILA