December 29, 2016 This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci

Top Mob Story Of 2016: Huge 46 Defendant Racketeering Case

Gang Land Exclusive!Joseph MerlinoWithout question, the number one Gang Land story of the year was the humongous Manhattan Federal Court indictment of Philadelphia Mafia boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino and 45 other wiseguys and mob associates from five states and four New York crime families on racketeering conspiracy charges.

It stemmed from the work of John (J.R.) Rubeo, a longtime mob associate in the crew of powerful Genovese capo Pasquale (Patsy) Parrello who was caught dealing drugs and decided to wear a wire for the FBI in the hope of saving himself from a long stretch in prison.

Along the way, Rubeo managed to introduce an undercover FBI agent into what ended up as a five year probe in which they recorded thousands of hours of conversations that tied the 46 charged defendants — and others to be indicted later — to a slew of racketeering crimes, including a lucrative heath care fraud scheme that put hundreds of thousands of dollars into mob coffers.

Pasquale ParrelloLast week we described how Rubeo and the agent known as "Jeff" worked together to tape numerous conversations involving Merlino, Parrello and others during a gala Christmas party at Pasquale's Rigoletto, the landmark Arthur Avenue restaurant that served as Parrello's base of operations during the probe.

We still don't have the photo, but sources say that during the party Merlino, Parrello and Genovese capo Eugene (Rooster) O'Nofrio, the top three defendants in the case, posed for a picture and, according to one source, "joked that the photo was going to get them arrested."

Without any further ado, Gang Land awards the If You See Something, Say Something Award to Parrello for his actions, which, while he didn't follow the MTA-inspired saying to the letter, he knew the "right thing" to do when he spotted FBI video cameras in his restaurant in 2012. He had his workers take the expensive equipment down, and place it all together in the same place in the restaurant, so it could be picked up by the feds. Which happened, sources say, a day or so later. That was another savvy move. If Parrello had destroyed it, as he probably knew, he would have been liable for its cost.

Anthony SpinelliToo bad, for his sake, he didn't spot the electronic equipment that Rubeo wore for five years.

Anthony Spinelli, a frequent customer at Pasquale's Rigoletto, and owner of Arthur Avenue Jewelry across the street, became a local hero in 2011 when he pulled out his licensed handgun and shot one of three holdup men who tried to rob his store. Today though, he gets the What The Hell Was I Thinking Award for agreeing to co-sign a $2 million bond to guarantee that Parrello would not flee if Judge Richard Sullivan had agreed to set bail for him in October.

By then, everyone on Arthur Avenue and beyond knew that J.R. Rubeo had been a wired up federal operative for years. Either Spinelli didn't, or he forgot that he had allegedly bought lots of "stolen" jewelry from Rubeo over the years — more than $100,000 worth, sources say — and had no idea that the feds would surely oppose him as a worthy candidate if Sullivan had granted bail.

Richard SullivanThe issue didn't arise in October because Patsy's lawyers had blocked out the names of all the potential co-signors, and Judge Sullivan ruled that Parrello was a danger to the community and should remain detained while he awaits trial. But last week Judge Sullivan ruled that there was no legal reason to seal the names, thus triggering two year-end Gang Land awards.

Judge Sullivan, a former assistant U.S. attorney who was appointed to the federal bench in 2007, gets the Let The Sun Shine In Award for consistently following in the tradition of the late U.S. Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis, who blasted secret dealings in Harper's Weekly more than 100 years ago, writing: "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."

Preet BhararaU.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, on the other hand, gets the Joe Paterno Award for following in the tradition of the disgraced late Penn State football coach who concealed an assistant coach's sexual proclivities for years. The award is for refusing to disclose the status of a convicted pervert who pleaded guilty to soliciting sex with a minor in 2008 who became a cooperating witness for his office in a less than stunning prosecution of 29 mob-connected defendants on labor racketeering charges in the waste hauling business.

Less than stunning because Preet's prosecutors dismissed all charges against 10 of the 29 defendants.

Judge Kenneth Karas, a former colleague of Bharara's in the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office — Karas was an AUSA from 1992 to 2004; Bharara from 2000 to 2005 — gets an Honorable Mention for aiding and abetting Bharara's prosecutors keep secret whatever happened to Charles Hughes, who was caught red-handed with a supply of condoms for an assignation with a 15-year-old girl at a Westchester hotel back on August 27, 2008.

Kenneth KarasThe three children of the late mob attorney Nicholas Gravante, including son Nicholas Jr., a powerful Manhattan attorney, get the Spoiled Rotten Award for contesting their 81-year-old widowed mom's longstanding right to collect $50,000 a month royalties from rental properties that they owned together for the rest of her life. The kids had the finest things while growing up and lots of real estate properties their father gave them, but they apparently couldn't bear to see their mom spend money they would no longer be able to inherit.

The Willie Sutton Award goes to mob associate Michael Mazzara, who allegedly managed to take part in two huge bank heists this year that reaped $5 million while he was being watched closely by the FBI, which had a pole camera trained on his Brooklyn home.

Cyrus Vance JrComing up with The Worst Possible Hiding Place In The World goes to Mazzara's codefendant, Jonathan Mascuzzio, for placing $1.4 million in cash, his alleged end of the bank burglaries, in a duffle bag in his Brooklyn home.

Last but not least, The Biggest Loser Of The Year Award goes to Manhattan District Cyrus Vance Jr. He lost his top mob prosecutor Eric Seidel, essentially pushing him to resign. Months later, after a three-month trial, a jury hung 6-6 in a racketeering case against Bonanno gangsters. After that, despite scads of taped evidence linking Robert Stuart, the creator of software now used by virtually all mob bookies, to Gambino soldier Joseph Isgro, sources say he gave away the entire landmark case because he had no one who was both willing and able to take the case to trial. Gave away is no exaggeration. Isgro paid a $1000 fine; the case against Stuart was dismissed outright.

Top Prosecutor Was An NBA Bust As A Small Forward For The Atlanta Hawks

Grady O'MalleyGang Land's Prosecutor Of The Year is assistant U.S. attorney Vincent (Grady) O'Malley, a college hoops star at Manhattan College who played pro ball for a year with the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA back in 1969 before going to law school and getting a job as an assistant district attorney with the Bronx District Attorney's office in 1973.

O'Malley, 68, also gets a Lifetime Achievement Award. The career prosecutor, who last month celebrated his 40th anniversary as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, is the senior litigation counsel of the Newark U.S. Attorney's Organized Crime and Gangs unit, which he headed for many years.

Charles StangoHe has tried about 140 cases over the years — and lost only three. But one was a lollapalooza that became the subject of a book, The Boys From New Jersey. It was a staggering across the board acquittal in 1988 of 20 Luchese mobsters and associates on racketeering charges in the longest mob trial in American history — after only 14 hours of deliberations. It was a devastating blow. But like the stunning acquittal of John Gotti and six others a year earlier, the verdict had been bought and paid for. Three acquitted mobsters admitted the bribery scheme five years later.

Earlier this month, O'Malley accepted a guilty plea from DeCavalcante capo Charles (Charlie The Hat) Stango, who admitted offering an undercover FBI agent up to $50,000 to murder a rival mobster because Stango believed he had disrespected family elders and deserved to die. The feds pulled the plug on the case and no one was hurt. Stango, 73, faces up to 12 years behind bars.

Grady O'MalleyAnd as Gang Land reported last month, O'Malley declined to present allegations against two other mobsters who were also charged with the murder plot on an FBI complaint before the grand jury because there was no evidence in the tape recorded talks that the duo had sanctioned or approved Charlie The Hat's murder plan.

Stango's son Anthony and five other members of Charlie The Hat's crew have pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution charges. Gang Land expects that the last defendant in the case, Luigi (Dog) Oliveri, the mobster whom Stango plotted to kill, will soon cop a plea deal to cover the cigarette bootlegging charges against him — rather than go to trial.

O'Malley declined to talk about the Stango case — "It's still pending" — and had little to say about his prowess on the basketball court when he was a 6-foot-5, 205 pound small forward except that "my year with the Hawks convinced me to go to law school."

1969-1970 Atlanta HawksAccording to the Manhattan College website, O'Malley was a "ferocious rebounder" who led the "Metropolitan Conference in scoring and rebounding" in his senior year as the team's MVP, was a Conference All-Star and was inducted into the school's athletic Hall Of Fame in 2007.

During the 1969-70 season with the Hawks, though, O'Malley averaged two points a game and a single rebound, according to official NBA stats, and probably made the right decision to go to law school.

Noted Brooklyn attorney Jacob (Jack) Evseroff, who worked as a state prosecutor in the 1950s and then spent more than half a century on the other side of the aisle, is the Defense Lawyer Of The Year. The 91-year-old barrister, who passed the state bar in 1949, took down his shingle this year after getting a sweet "time served" sentence for a heroin dealer in an international mob drug trafficking case. Gang Land recounted some of Evseroff's long history in a recent column.

Jack EvseroffAn Honorable Mention goes to appeals specialist Harlan Protass. The attorney filed impressive legal briefs seeking to overturn a life sentence for mob-linked heroin dealer Mark Reiter after winning reversals for two other mob-connected drug dealers serving life terms for their roles in the notorious Blue Thunder heroin ring that plagued the metro area in the 1980s and 90s. The Reiter case appeal awaits a decision by Manhattan Federal Judge Vernon Broderick.

Rookie Of The Year goes to Anthony DiPietro, a young lawyer with three years behind him. DiPietro has a knack for finding withheld evidence in cases that the government had thought were long forgotten, including the racketeering convictions of mob associates Edmund (Eddie) Boyle and Joseph Brideson, and of Carmine (Junior) Persico in the historic Commission case.

Bronx assistant district attorney Christine Scaccia gets the Procrastination Award for managing to indict two suspects in the 2013 mob rubout of Michael Meldish and keep them behind bars for 18 months without turning over "discovery material" that should have been given to their defense lawyers within weeks of the indictment. She did it again this month when she sent an assistant to a scheduled court session who got the judge to put the case off until next month.

Charles Carnesi on the setLawyer Charles Carnesi, who played himself in the Gotti biopic that is slated for release next year, The Life and Death of John Gotti, gets the Ed McDonald-Goodfellas Award for playing himself as an attorney in a mob movie about his own, real life, courtroom drama. Carnesi, who told Gang Land that his on-camera work was a "one time thing," joked that he didn't think he was eligible for an Oscar because "I wasn't really acting." The lawyer may have a bigger problem — ending up on the cutting room floor. Carnesi isn't listed as either a cast member, or a character, among the 100 or so of each on the IMDb.com (Internet Movie Database) website.

The best quote about the financial condition of today's mob came from attorney Mathew Mari, who has been in practice for over 40 years, and also has a weekly talk radio show on WVOX-1460 AM. When told by a potential client that he had no money Mari replied, "I am a lawyer to MAKE money, why are you a criminal?"

Still Crazy (About Vito) After All These Years

Vito GuzzoLongtime Colombo gangster Vito Guzzo suffered an eye injury in a federal prison dustup in Danbury last year, and he is not a happy camper in far off Seagoville, Texas these days, where the Bureau of Prisons shipped him, adding insult to his injury. But Guzzo got a great Thinking Of You Card from a bunch of his old pals this year, the best that Gang Land has come across.

It features a dozen smiling faces of a group of wiseguys, mob associates and others with Wish You Were Here looks in a posed photo that was taken at a July 4 barbeque in Massapequa L.I., at the home of a friend of an old Colombo crime family buddy, soldier Salvatore (Sallie Bread) Cambria.

Cambria, 65, is the fourth guy from the right, wearing a white polka dot shirt with a gold chain and medal around his neck. Sallie Bread, the focal point of a mob dispute in 2002 when the Lucheses forced the owners of a bar and restaurant on the Miracle Mile in Freeport to buy their bread from him, has a usury rap but has managed to avoid any serious time behind bars.

July 4 BarbecueSources say the picture was sent to Guzzo, who still has 13 and a half years left in the 36-year prison term for racketeering and murder that he's serving, by his older brother Anthony, 57, who's the second smiling face from the right in the blue shirt, standing next to the gray headed Gambino soldier Michael Mattarazzo, 65, in the white shirt.

Anthony Guzzo was implicated, but never charged in an alleged plot to whack FBI undercover agent Joaquim (Big Jack) Garcia in 2005 after he infiltrated the crime family for three years and enabled the feds to convict 32 Gambinos on racketeering and other charges.

At the time, Anthony was in Sing Sing state prison serving five years for parole violation. But the FBI took the threat seriously based on his — and his brother's — known propensity for violence. Anthony was behind bars for nearly killing a patron in a Long Island bar fight in 2002 by slashing him in the neck with a knife. His parole stemmed from 1990 manslaughter and assault convictions for killing one man and wounding another in Queens.

Anthony GuzzoVito, 52, is serving 36 years in a plea deal for five mob rubouts. He was also involved in a 1997 home invasion robbery in Mill Basin, Queens.

Gambino soldier Frank Radice, the dark-haired, front and center wiseguy in the orange shirt was bounced from his Teamsters union job because of his status as a made man. In the white shirt, with his left hand on Radice's shoulder, is longtime Gambino associate Anthony Amoroso, a onetime driver for John A. (Junior) Gotti. Amoroso, 53, was among scores of rabble rousers outside the federal courthouse in downtown Brooklyn that overturned cars and stoked a mini-riot on June 23, 1992, the day the late Mafia boss was sentenced to life in prison.

Radice's brother, John (Johnny Biz) Radice, a reputed associate in Gurino's crew, is standing behind Amoroso, with his right hand on Amoroso's shoulder.

Junior Gotti, ChefSources say that Frank Radice, Matarazzo, who owns a trucking company, Amoroso, who runs a restaurant, and Steve Kaplan, another former Junior Gotti pal, are all closely aligned with capo Caesar Gurino, a cohort of the late Dapper Don. The quintet was among a dozen or so attendees at a Christmas party for the crew last week at Matteo's on Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, the sources say, noting that Luchese capo, Joseph DeBenedetto, the son-in-law of that family's imprisoned for life boss, Vittorio (Vic) Amuso, who also hails from Howard Beach, was also at the party.

Junior Gotti, who gets this year's Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None Award, was nowhere near Matteo's. But based on a Christmas Day New York Post picture-story, in which the beefed-up, erstwhile Junior Don-turned movie producer was wearing an extra-large red Christmas shirt and apron making like Mario Batali, he was likely slaving over a hot stove preparing a "spicy seafood stew." That's what he told reporter Dean Balsamini he'd make and serve 60 or so family members and close friends during the Gotti family's traditional Feast Of The Seven Fishes dinner on Christmas Eve.

The picture of Junior in the kitchen of Saggio's in East Norwich reminds Gang Land of a picture of another Junior wearing a red apron and working in a kitchen that landed on Gang Land's desk decades ago — of Carmine (Junior) Persico. The 83-year-old mob boss was in the kitchen at the Lompoc Federal Prison where he served many of the 31 plus years he has spent behind bars in the government's 1980s war against the mob. He gets the Longest Prisoner Of War Award.

Can anyone post the photo's they he is referencing ?

Radice



Cambria



Matarazzo

http://irbcases.wrlc.org/bitstream/handl....pdf?sequence=1

His capo is Anthony gurino not Caesar . Caesar is a gambino soldier and the brother of capo Anthony Gurino

Thanks Moe

That guy Radice is in a bunch of pic with JR Gotti back in the late 80's.
I think Radice had a father that had a button ?

No problem, Belmont.

Louie, funny you just mentioned the Gurino's. I just posted an old surveillance pic of the two of them in the rare photos thread.

Vito Guzzo is lucky he may see the light of day again, didn't he basically go on a killing spree at one time? Six bodies and he has a release date, not bad, not bad at all.

thanks for the post moe...I got Anthony Gurino confused with Sonny Juliano. Isnt one of them on the alleged ruling panel for the Gambinos?