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Yet Another Colombo Capo Turns On Tommy Shots Gioeli
You’d think things couldn’t possibly get worse for Thomas (Tommy Shots) Gioeli, the accused Colombo family street boss awaiting trial for six murders. Since he was jailed in 2008, he’s missed his father’s funeral, his daughter’s wedding, and his cousin became a stool pigeon.
But they just did – for him, his codefendant, and what’s left of his beleaguered crime family.
Yesterday, Gioeli and his fellow wiseguys learned that yet another Colombo mobster has been secretly working with the FBI for more than six months, and has tape recorded more evidence linking Tommy Shots to the 1999 rubout of former underboss William (Wild Bill) Cutolo.
The new turncoat, Gang Land has learned, is capo Reynold (Ren) Maragni. And he’s been a busy little mob beaver, managing to tape record four conversations with another mobster between November 18 and December 8 that tie Gieoli and codefendant Dino (Little Dino) Saracino to the Cutolo rubout, prosecutors disclosed in court papers yesterday.
On Tuesday evening, sources say, Maragni, who has long been a stalwart supporter of imprisoned Mafia boss Carmine (Junior) Persico, was whisked away from the home he shared with his girlfriend. The girlfriend stayed behind and quickly passed along the bad news to his former buddies.
In each of the tape-recorded talks – and another in which the recorder malfunctioned – Maragni recorded mobster Vincent Manzo as he admitted his role in the slaying and as he fingered Tommy Shots and Little Dino, according to prosecutors Elizabeth Geddes, James Gatta and Cristina Posa.
The discussions were triggered by a subpoena that Manzo’s son was served by another busy beaver, the very pro-active FBI agent Scott Curtis. On the tape, the elder Manzo is heard stating that he picked up Cutolo’s body at Little Dino’s Brooklyn home, then drove it to a Long Island bowling alley where he met up with Tommy Shots, who “directed Manzo to the burial site.”
In one conversation, recorded on a Brooklyn pier, Manzo, 73, and Maragni, 58, were joined by acting capo Luca DiMatteo, 67. In short answers to questions his mob superiors posed, Manzo said that he used his own car to drive Cutolo’s body from Brooklyn to Long Island, assuring DiMatteo that he had gotten rid of the car “a long time ago.”
“You’re still involved,” observed DiMatteo, who was ostensibly at the meeting so he could be officially introduced to Manzo as his new skipper. That was part of an elaborate sting the FBI pulled off in August when Maragni, 58, pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in open court in an effort to convince his mob cohorts that he wasn’t a turncoat.
Sources tell Gang Land that when Maragni, who had been charged with home invasion, drug dealing, bribery, and several violent extortion counts and detained as a danger in January, was released on home confinement in April, wiseguys suspected he was a “rat” and shunned him.
“The guy’s detained, facing more than a hundred years and all of a sudden he’s out, on house arrest with an ankle bracelet, and he’s coming around,” said a neighborhood source. “I said hello, and good-bye,” he said, adding, “What am I, a fucking jerk?”
“He’s supposed to be sick, and he’s coming to card games,” added an underworld source who told Gang Land that he “told everyone the guy was a rat. I can’t believe people talked to the guy.”
After several months of getting nothing from Maragni’s efforts, the feds apparently moved their sting into high gear, arranging for Maragni to plead guilty to racketeering charges calling for a maximum of eight years in prison and restitution of $500,000.
“It was a scam, and a disgrace,” said one defense lawyer who asked that his name not be used.
“The FBI actually tried to use him as a spy in the defense camp,” said another attorney, who recalled that Maragni “yelled and screamed and tried to intimidate an attorney into letting him attend a co-defendants’ meeting at the MDC. (Metropolitan Detention Center.)”
Asked by Gang Land if Maragni’s guilty plea was a scam, attorney Richard Shanley said he did not have “any comment that I want to make about this matter. He pled guilty and that’s all I want to say about that.”
FBI agent Curtis and supervisor Seamus McElearney referred calls to spokesman Jim Margolin. Said Margolin: “The FBI’s conduct with regard to cooperating witnesses is strictly regulated and the FBI complied with all internal guidelines and legal requirements in this matter.”
Gioeli’s lawyer, Adam Perlmutter, declined to comment, as did Saracino’s attorney, Samuel Braverman.
Maragni is the sixth Colombo mobster (four capos) to have joined Team America since Gioeli was indicted. He is the third defendant in the 39-defendant Colombo family racketeering indictment filed on Mafia Takedown Day in January to defect.
At the end of his discussion with Manzo and DiMatteo last month, Maragni wondered aloud whether there was “anybody” they should worry about.
“Well listen,” said DiMatteo, in an incredible faux pas, “I heard through the grapevine, okay, that somebody’s out here with a wire. You don’t have a phone on you."
It is disgusting...
They keep getting their asses kicked by the feds. Must say that the Colombos really get hammered.
