This Week In Gang Land
May 6, 2010
By Jerry Capeci

Feds Went Down Low To Make Mob Sex Trafficking Case

The details on the big Gambino sex-trafficking bust last month are starting to come in, and – no real surprise here – the picture emerging is not nearly as neat and tidy as the ‘Feds to the Rescue’ scenario initially offered up by law enforcement.

For one thing, Gang Land has learned that the key informant in the case was a 32-year-old Brooklyn low-life named Jude Buoneto (right, his best Mick Jagger pose) who was intimately involved with the stable of young hookers in the case.

For another, in order to get the goods on the Gambino gangsters, agreed to a cooperation deal with Buoneto, who has an old sex assault charge on his rap sheet, and allowed the prostitution ring to run for at least ten months. That was even after FBI agents and prosecutors learned – or should have learned – that teenage girls, including a 15 year old, were being supplied to gamblers and other clients in New York and New Jersey.

It is unclear exactly when the sex-trafficking began, or how long it lasted.

What is clear, say knowledgeable sources on both sides of the case, is that in October 2008, the feds wired up Buoneto, and sent him out to tape record his cohorts, using a stable of young prostitutes as important props.

Defense sources say Buoneto was the young prostitute’s pimp, and – as is the norm with pimps – he had sexual relations with his hookers, including the 15-year-old runaway. Law enforcement sources emphatically deny that. The prostitutes allegedly serviced customers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey, for between 10 and 12 months.

Law enforcement sources reiterate what prosecutors Elie Honig and Steve Kwok have said in court and in the detention memo they filed: that Gambino soldier Thomas Orefice (left) was the leader and driving force behind the sex-trafficking caper, and that the 150 to 200 hours of tape recorded conversation they have will back that up.

“We can’t comment on whether or not there was a cooperator in the case,” said FBI spokesman Jim Margolin, “but rest assured that this office would not – and did not – approve of any criminal activity involving a minor, much less the sexual exploitation of a minor.”

The U.S. Attorney’s office would not comment, declining to discuss whether their witness pleaded guilty to statutory rape charges before he began cooperating.

Said one former federal prosecutor: “There was a screwup here. I do not believe that agents and prosecutors would knowingly allow prostitution involving a minor to go on. But since they had a cooperator in the middle of the action, they sure as hell should have known about it.”

Several defense lawyers, as well as one law enforcement source, have fingered Buoneto as the stool pigeon in the sex-trafficking aspect of the multi-count racketeering indictment.

“I am confident,” said Orefice’s lawyer, Seth Ginsberg, “that the evidence will show that it was the cooperating witness who orchestrated and carried out the sex trafficking that is charged in the indictment. The government’s claims to the contrary are belied by the fact that nowhere in the detention memo or at the bail hearing do they make a specific reference to anything in the recorded conversations that implicate my client in these crimes.”

Buoneto was charged with felony sexual assault charges involving a minor back in 1997 but later copped a no-jail plea to misdemeanor charges of endangering the welfare of a child. Earlier this year he suddenly disappeared from his usual Bensonhurst, Brooklyn haunts.

He left just as the feds were getting ready to scoop up six men and one woman, a 43-year-old single mom named Suzanne Porcelli, on sex trafficking charges involving a minor. Attorney Vincent Romano, who represents Porcelli hopes that Buoneto recorded the intense discussion that he had with his client in August, on the last day of what the lawyer described as a tumultuous and terrifying two-week ordeal for Porcelli, who has a 19-year-long history of anxiety and depression, according to the attorney.

The ordeal began when Buoneto, who knew Porcelli from the neighborhood, rang her bell and told her he had fired his personal assistant in his construction company and wanted to hire her on a tryout basis, gave her a mobile phone, and instructed her to “make and set up appointments for his customers,” said Romano.

“A couple of days later, she realizes this is not for her and she calls him up and says, ‘Come pick up your phone,’ but he refuses,” said Romano. The attorney declined to cite specific reasons for Porcelli’s quitting, or to say whether or not she was handling customers seeking carpentry work or hookers. But over the next few days, says Romano, his client “called Jude repeatedly to come get his phone.” Buoneto didn’t respond, said Romano, so “she just stopped answering the phone. Then he calls her up (on her phone) threatening her and screaming at her for not answering the phone.”

Following several screaming telephone sessions in which “Jude tells her she’s ruining his business and has got to answer the phone, it comes to a head.” Buoneto arrives at Porcelli’s home, forces her into the back seat of his car, a gray BMW, and proceeds to terrify her during a scream-filled hour-long ride through the streets of Bensonhurst, according to Romano.

“He threatens her using very colorful, terrible language,” said Romano. “She was terrified. He was driving at high speeds, stopping short, swerving, yelling and screaming at her, doing everything he can do to frighten her. She still refuses, gives him the phone back.”

The hellacious ride took a surreal turn, said Romano, when “the phone started ringing and she wouldn’t answer it. Jude answers the phone, disguising his voice like a female, with a high pitched voice. He makes the appointment, and then takes Suzanne home.”

Romano said that during the two weeks in question, his client, who has been receiving regular psychiatric counseling at a mental health clinic for more than two years, never accepted any money from Buoneto.

“My client has been unfairly portrayed in the newspapers, on television and on the internet. She has been villainized as a madam,” said Roman. “The bottom line is that because of her mental condition she was manipulated, used and victimized by a sexual predator who is now a cooperating witness. When all the facts are known, I am sure she will be exonerated.”

Buoneto was a few days short of his 20th birthday when he was charged with sexually abusing a young girl at a local swimming pool in Bensonhurst. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and was sentenced to three years probation on May 7, 1988, according to court records in Brooklyn Supreme Court.


Bronx DA Nabs Driver In 1992

Mob Murder Under The El
It’s taken nearly two decades, but a once-feared Genovese family enforcer based in New Jersey returned to the Bronx this week to face charges for the 1992 execution murder of a mob associate who engaged in the risky business of sticking up mob social clubs.

Paul (Doc) Gaccione, who was held without bail at his arraignment Tuesday, is the third mob suspect charged with the murder of Angelo Sangiuolo. But it doesn’t close the book on the slaying, which was sanctioned by then-boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante.

Law enforcement officials tell Gang Land they still have one more suspect in their sights – Anthony (Tony D) Palumbo, a powerful family capo whose social clubs Sangiuolo robbed back in the early 1990s. Palumbo, 61, is currently awaiting trial on unrelated racketeering charges in Manhattan.

According to court testimony, Gaccione, 62, drove the murder van in which Sangiuolo was sitting when he was shot to death; Palumbo, whose social clubs Sangiuolo had robbed, had triggered the slaying that was carried out on Westchester Avenue as a Number 6 train roared by overhead on the elevated Pelham Bay Line.

Genovese capo Angelo Prisco, (right) who oversaw the slaying and drove the getaway car, was convicted of the murder in Manhattan Federal Court last year and sentenced to life. The gunman, John (Johnny Balls) Leto, who cooperated with the feds, is slated to be a key witness for assistant district attorney Robert Caliendo when Gaccione’s case goes to trial in Bronx Supreme Court.

According to Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, the case was referred to his office by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office after it decided that the racketeering statutes it used against Prisco were not available to bring Gaccione to justice.

In his testimony last year, Leto said that a few months after the killing, Tony D Palumbo (left) “hugged and kissed” him in appreciation when Tony D learned that Leto was the “shooter in the situation” when they met at a Russian nightclub in Brooklyn.

Palumbo, who allegedly oversees the crime family’s New Jersey rackets, is slated to go to trial in Manhattan Federal Court for racketeering charges including loansharking, gambling and extortion later this year.


Aging Wiseguy Takes Life Rather Than Go To Prison

With the help of glowing letters about him from 95 relatives and friends, Gambino mobster Anthony (Todo) Anastasio won a sweet 30 month sentence for violent crimes that called for 20 years – but the lenient prison term was apparently not good enough for the aging wiseguy.

Anastasio, 81, fired two bullets into his heart last Friday morning in the kitchen of his Dyker Heights, Brooklyn home, just ten days before he was scheduled to report to prison to begin this stretch behind bars.

In October, he was found guilty of racketeering charges including extortion and an arson in which a family of four escaped by jumping out of a second story window. In meting out the sentence, Brooklyn Federal Judge Brian Cogan said a major reason for his lenient prison term was that he did not wish Anastasio to die in prison.

Todo, a former longshoreman’s union official who was convicted of labor racketeering on the waterfront along with legendary docks boss Anthony Scotto 30 years ago, spent about 18 months behind bars for that conviction.

Police found a .22 caliber handgun, two spent shell casings, along with a suicide note that Anastasio wrote when they responded to his home. In the note, sources say Anastasio indicated that he was suffering a lot of pain.

Following a funeral mass at St. Bernadette R.C. Church in Brooklyn, Anastasio was buried yesterday at St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, L.I. He is survived by Dolores, his wife of 49 years, five children and nine grandchildren.

I actually feel bad for Suzanne Porcelli. "Gambino madam" indeed.

Tops though. Thanks.

Its always convenient when I get to read the new weekly gangland on this forum. Thanks Ivyleague


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Thanks for the article.