December 8, 2016 This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci

Noted Brooklyn Barrister Jack Evseroff Takes Down His Shingle

Gang Land Exclusive!Jacob EvseroffJacob (Jack) Evseroff, the veteran Brooklyn-based barrister famed for his courtroom expertise and theatrics, has made it official: The case he handled earlier this year before Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Sterling Johnson on behalf of a client accused of heroin trafficking is his last.

There will be no more alleged arsonists, no more allegedly murderous felons, and no more wiseguys represented by the 91-year-old attorney who has been practicing law since Harry S. Truman was in the White House.

"I had a pretty good run, but it's time to call it a day," Evseroff told Gang Land.

As it happens, however, his last case was also a first. For Evseroff, who spent the last half century as a defense attorney after a dozen years as a prosecutor, the heroin trafficking case was the only one he had ever handled before Judge Johnson, the 82-year-old jurist who is also an old friend of the now-retiring attorney. And therein lies a Gang Land-worthy tale.

It begins in the late 1950s, when Evseroff was prosecuting felonies in Brooklyn, and Johnson was a detective in Bedford Stuyvesant. Back then, the ADA helped and encouraged the young African-American cop to pursue his goal of becoming an attorney.

Samuel LiebowitzAt the time, Evseroff was a World War II vet who joined the DA's office in 1950. The young prosecutor was trying cases before Judge Samuel Leibowitz, who had his own legendary career as a defense lawyer — and a civil rights attorney — before earning a reputation as a hanging judge. "He kept recidivism down by locking them up forever," Evseroff cracked.

Johnson was an ex-Marine who had joined the NYPD in 1955. He was earning his BA at Brooklyn College at night, with the goal of attending law school. But that goal remained difficult — if not impossible — because of a 79th precinct "chart" that required detectives to rotate their shifts.

"Sterling was a detective in Bed-Stuy, and a damn good one," Evseroff recalled in a recent interview. "I was a senior riding ADA. He wants to go to law school, but he can't do it because of the 'chart.' So I facilitated getting him off the chart so he could have regular hours and go to law school. He was a detective in the 79 squad, one of only two blacks; there must have been 35 detectives, only two black guys — a different time," said Evseroff.

Johnson confirmed that Evseroff was one of those who helped push him along his career track.

Judge Sterling JohnsonNoting that "all good things" are the result of "many factors along the way," Johnson told Gang Land this week that "Jack was certainly one of them in my case. I went to college and law school while working as a detective. I worked full time at night as a detective, and went to law school in the day time."

Johnson graduated Brooklyn Law School in 1966, went on to become a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, and served as the city's special narcotics prosecutor from the mid-1970s until 1991, when he was appointed to the federal bench. "He's had a real distinguished career," said Evseroff.

Johnson returned the compliment. "Jack was a crackerjack trial attorney," recalled Johnson.

In his first appearance before Johnson, after the business at hand involving the heroin trafficker was resolved, the two old colleagues exchanged pleasantries. Evseroff, who uses a walker now but is otherwise keenly attuned to everything around him, asked Johnson whether he recognized him. The judge replied, "Is that really you Jack," and Evseroff responded, "It's me, judge."

Evseroff IDAfter one pre-trial proceeding, said Evseroff, the lawyer showed the judge his old DA's ID card, and they kidded each other about the old days. "He got a kick out of seeing that," said Evseroff.

In 1962, though, when Evseroff left the DA's office, he become a scourge of the law enforcement community – probably including Johnson – when he signed on as a defense lawyer for one of three mob associates charged in the brutal murder of two NYPD detectives in a $4000 robbery of a Brooklyn convenience store on May 18, 1962.

The detectives, both Brooklyn residents, were killed when they interrupted the robbery at the Boro Park Tobacco Co., after one gunman, Anthony (Baldy) Portelli, shouted, "Don't shoot, I quit," but then shot and killed the plainclothes detectives who had let their guard down.

Portelli, and a second armed robber, Jerome (Jerry The Jew) Rosenberg were convicted and sentenced to death by Leibowitz in February of 1963, (the sentence was later reduced to life). But Evseroff represented a third defendant who had driven the cop killers to the store and then fled as the bullets flew. The lawyer won a mistrial for his client, Anthony Dellernia.

Al Seedman & Anthony Dellernia"I didn't get any publicity because of the newspaper strike (it lasted from December 8, 1962 until March 31, 1963) but the cops and my old colleagues in the DA's office knew about it, and they weren't happy about that," Evseroff recalled.

They were furious again three months later when he won an acquittal for Dellernia at his retrial before another judge.

While spinning stories about his days as a prosecutor, Gang Land at one point wondered if the aged attorney was confused when he stated that "Kenny McCabe was the best lawyer" he worked with in the DA's office. Kenny McCabe, as Gang Land readers know, was a dogged NYPD detective-mob buster who died in 2006. It turns out that Evseroff was talking about McCabe's dad, the former Chief Assistant DA who suffered a heart attack and died at his desk in 1963, after a 24 year career.

Evseroff says he tried more than 500 cases in his career. "In one seven month period as an ADA in Leibowitz's part, I tried 26 cases to verdict, got 25 convictions. One went to the chair," he said matter-of-factly.

Before taking the bench, Leibowitz earned huge fees defending Al Capone. Those funds allowed him to work pro bono for four years to help overturn death sentences in the famous case of nine black youths known as the Scottsboro Boys. They were unfairly convicted of raping a white woman on a freight train in Alabama in 1931, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, because blacks were excluded from the jury panel. It was Leibowitz, Evseroff said, who urged him to leave the DA's office.

"He said, 'Jack, it's time for you to go earn some money,'" Evseroff recalled.

Jac Evseroff circa 1954As a defense lawyer, Evseroff shunned publicity, he said, because he figured "it would get me in trouble. But I got my share of business through word of mouth because I worked cheap. I had decent fees but I didn't hold people up. I got a lot of work over the years. I tried a lot of cases."

Charles Carnesi, who was born in 1949, the same year Evseroff passed the New York state bar, told Gang Land that like Evseroff, "I learned how to try cases in the Brooklyn DA's office, but I went to graduate school trying cases as a defense lawyer alongside Jack. Watching him work was a privilege and an education."

Evseroff said his cases fit into three groups: the Mafia, cops, and miscellaneous. His most well- known defendant is in the miscellaneous category — Howard (Buddy) Jacobson, the horse trainer who was convicted in 1980 of the murder of his girlfriend Melanie Cain. Jacobson later escaped from the Brooklyn House of Detention but was captured a month later and died in state prison in 1989.

A decade after going into private practice, Evseroff became a go-to lawyer for cops in trouble when he engineered an acquittal in 1974 for Thomas Shea, the first NYPD cop charged with murder while on the job. He shot and killed an unarmed 10-year-old black boy in the back while looking for suspects in a taxi robbery.

Jack Evseroff And Thomas Shea Lately, Evseroff's been discussing his many career highlights with screenwriters for a proposed two hour movie titled, The Legend. "They tell me it'll be a pilot for a TV series. They better not wait too long," he cracked. "I'd like to see it, and I'm going to be 92 in April."

In all, he says he's won acquittals for six of eight police officers he's defended on murder charges – not all were NYPD cops. One was convicted in a domestic dispute in which the victim was also a police officer — the guilty cop's wife. The eighth, Thomas Ryan was convicted of criminally negligent homicide in 1977 and got up to four years for the beating death of a prisoner in his custody.

He also represented numerous cops, including high-ranking officers, on departmental charges that never became public, he says.

In his last case, Evseroff represented a recidivist drug dealer he had defended years earlier named Alexander Chan, who was caught red-handed, and on tape, supplying heroin to Franco Lupoi, a Brooklyn drug dealer with ties to the Gambino family and the Calabrian-based organized crime group known as 'Ndrangheta. Chan decided to cooperate, and spent only two years behind bars.

Over the years, Evseroff generally made the best possible use out of the cards he was dealt on behalf of his clients.

"He always knew his way around the courtroom," said Judge Johnson. "He knew when to fold them, and he knew when to hold them."

Suspected Killer Of L&B Owner Indicted On Murder Charges

Andres FernandezA drug addled grifter with no known mob ties was indicted on murder and attempted robbery charges Monday for the June 30 ambush killing of L&B Spumoni Gardens Pizzeria Restaurant owner Louis Barbati. The owner of the famed Brooklyn eatery was gunned down in front of his Dyker Heights home as he arrived home from work with a plastic bag containing $15,000 in cash.

Andres (Andy) Fernandez, a former Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn resident with a history of drug abuse, was hit with state charges that mirror those that the feds filed last month based on an arrest complaint filed by an FBI agent assigned to one of two squads that focus on mob activities in the New York area.

The feds have never implicated Barbati in criminal activity. But in 2011, the acting consigliere of the Colombo crime family pleaded guilty to a unique Gang Land crime: he admitted to extorting $4000 from a reputed Bonanno gangster who had stolen the iconic restaurant's famous pizza sauce and was using it in a copycat pizzeria in Staten Island.

Colombo associate Francis (B.F) Guerra, who is married to a relative of the Spumoni Gardens owners, was acquitted of related extortion charges at trial.

Francis GuerraSources say authorities fingered Fernandez, who was spotted at L&B hours before the killing, as the prime suspect in the slaying soon after Barbati was executed. But they held off charging him in an effort to determine whether Fernandez had any accomplices. They were also seeking to learn if the motive was robbery, since the gunman made no effort to grab the bag of money the victim was carrying before he ran.

The sources say the FBI and NYPD "kept close tabs" on the 40-year-old defendant, but when no real leads emerged, he was arrested on federal robbery-murder charges and pushed to cooperate. When Fernandez remained mum, authorities opted to hit him with state murder charges. Unlike the federal statute under which he had been charged, state prosecutors do not have to prove that the killing was the result of a robbery.

In a news release, acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said Fernandez, "wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses," had been laying in wait for an hour for Barbati. When he got home, Fernandez "walked across the street and shot the victim several times" and ran to his late-model Acura and drove away, "without taking the money," the release stated.

Fernandez, of Melville, L.I., faces 25 years-to-life if convicted. He was ordered held without bail as he awaits trial.

Grim Reaper Calls Sallie Larca

Salvatore LarcaGenovese soldier Salvatore (Sallie) Larca, who spent 15 years behind bars for heroin trafficking and never looked back after a controversial trial at which the key government witness reneged on an agreement he made to testify, cashed in his chips this week the way all wiseguys hope to — at home, in his bed, of natural causes.

Larca never quit smoking but his death at the age of 72 of a suspected heart attack in his sleep Monday was somewhat unexpected, according to friends of the Bronx-born and raised mobster, who watched his diet and seemed to be the picture of good health in recent months.

Larca, who was convicted of heroin trafficking in 1976 along with Luchese gangster Matthew Madonna, a longtime cohort of Harlem drug merchant Leroy (Nicky) Barnes, was snared in a 1987 FBI sting operation that featured the wired-up turncoat mobster Vincent (Fish) Cafaro. He never got Larca on tape, but jurors heard Fish talking about his supplier "Sallie" and saw him meeting with others on videotapes and convicted him along with three others.

Released in 2002, he worked for several years at the Balsamo Funeral Home on Westchester Avenue that is owned by his in-laws. More recently, he had been working in the real estate industry, according to a friend who asked that his name not be used.

Joseph Tomasello"I'm saddened," said his longtime attorney Murray Richman. "I really liked Sallie. I'm sorry about his passing but glad that he was able to turn his life around in recent years."

Friends and relatives paid their final respects yesterday at a one-day wake at the Balsamo Funeral Home. Larca will be laid to rest today at a private burial ceremony at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, following a funeral mass at St. Theresa's Church in Throggs Neck.

He is survived by Donna, his wife of 50 years, his son Salvatore Jr., who is behind bars for his own drug conviction, his daughter Jennifer, and five grandsons.

Larca wasn't the only veteran wiseguy to cash in his chips recently. Last month, Joseph (Joe T) Tomasello, a street boss of the Persico faction of the Colombo family during that clan's bloody 1991-93 war who spent eight years behind bars for his wartime crimes, died at a medical center in Stuart, Florida, where he relocated when he was released from prison in 2005. He was 84.

Survived by his wife Dolores, daughters Rita and Joanne, son Joseph, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, Tomasello is buried at Moravian Cemetery in Staten Island.

So sally ko's dad was a soldier in the Genovese like him? What crew was he in? I read the son was in Ernie Muscarellas crew?

Don't know much about Joe Tomasello..anyone have more info on him?

Thanks gangsterreport for sharing pal