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Two plead guilty to extorting businessmen in bid to collect debts
Vito Iozzo
Vito Iozzo (center) leaves the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse after pleading guilty to using intimidation and fear to collect debts for suburban business owner Mark Dziuban in 2010. (Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune)
By Jason Meisner,
Tribune reporter
contact the reporter Trials and ArbitrationCourts and the JudiciaryBlackmail and ExtortionDomestic TravelFBI
2 plead guilty to extorting businessmen
The team of extortionists marched into the owner’s office at a Chicago granite company looking to collect on a $500,000 debt.
One of them, a beefy former union bodyguard named George Brown, did the talking. Another, plumbing contractor Vito Iozzo, stood guard by the door. On Brown’s signal, a third, Patrick White, whacked the victim on the top of the head, knocking him to the floor, according to court records.
Suburban sales exec. among 9 indicted for scare tactics, violence, to collect debts
Suburban sales exec. among 9 indicted for scare tactics, violence, to collect debts
Jason Meisner
“I told the granite guy, hey mother f-----, this isn’t going to go away,” Brown admitted in a written statement filed in federal court. “I hit the granite guy in the head and then White kicked him. I told the granite guy that we had his phone number and that we would be calling him.”
In federal court Tuesday, Brown, 51, and Iozzo, 43, each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, admitting their roles in the beating as well as other extortion attempts that had them jetting off to Wisconsin and New Jersey in search of debtors.
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Federal guidelines call for a sentence of up to 6 ½ years in prison for Iozzo and as many as 10 years behind bars for Brown, but prosecutors have agreed to seek substantially reduced sentences if they continue to cooperate, including taking the witness stand at the upcoming trial of two co-defendants.
In his statement to the court, Brown admitted that both he and Iozzo participated in two attempts to extort money on behalf of Mark Dziuban, who at the time was the vice president of sales for American Litho, a printing company in Carol Stream. Prosecutors have alleged the two were enlisted as muscle by Paul Carparelli, of Itasca, who reputedly has ties to the Outfit’s Cicero faction.
cComments
Hey, youse guys don't want to meet wid no accident, do yas?
OLDERWISER
AT 12:15 PM SEPTEMBER 24, 2014
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Dziuban, Carparelli and White have all pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In one instance, Dziuban flew Brown and Iozzo on a private plane to Wisconsin in October 2010 to confront one target, the charges alleged. The three met the person in the back room of a restaurant and demanded that he provide cash or property to cover the $100,000 debt his company allegedly owed the Carol Stream business, prosecutors said.
The victim offered instead to hand over a special edition Ford Mustang as partial payment, according to a filing by prosecutors. When Iozzo asked him for an address where the car could be picked up, the victim was “shaking and stuttering” so badly that Iozzo instead grabbed the victim’s driver’s license and wrote the information down himself.
In another instance, Dziuban asked Brown and Carparelli to travel to New Jersey to look for a Nevada businessman who had failed to pay back several hundred thousand dollars, according to Brown’s plea agreement.
While there, they also confronted an employee of another company that purportedly owed Dziuban money, according to Brown’s statement. When they were told the matter was in court, Brown said he responded that Dziuban was not going to forget the debt.
“If you f----- him, then call him up and tell him you f----- him,” Brown said he told the employee.
In a clever ruse devised by the FBI in 2013, an undercover agent posing as a New Jersey state police investigator called Brown and started asking questions about his travels to the state two years earlier, including details about his rental car, court records show. The purpose of the call worked, touching off a flurry of phone calls and meetings between Brown, Carparelli and others worried about who may have ratted them out, court filings show.
“Paul, Mark asked us to do a specific thing,” Brown was quoted in a transcript as saying in one secretly recorded conversation with Carparelli. “We did exactly what we were asked to do. Did we get their attention? Yes, we did. Did we get the whole office’s attention? Yes, we did.”
Copyright © 2014, Chicago Tribune
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