A businessman who admitted participating in a $100 million gasoline tax-evasion scheme and having ties to mobsters was shot to death as he drove his Rolls-Royce in Brooklyn early yesterday, the police said.
After his car smashed into two parked ones in the Mill Basin section, the businessman, Michael Markowitz, staggered out and collapsed, Detective James J. Coleman said. Mr. Markowitz, who would have turned 43 years old on Saturday, was pronounced dead at Kings County Hospital.
In 1986 and 1987, Mr. Markowitz, a wholesale gasoline distributor, pleaded guilty to evading Federal, New York State and Florida excise and sales taxes. He agreed to repay $5 million and was sentenced in Federal District Court in Brooklyn to six months under house arrest and five years probation.
As part of the plea bargain, he cooperated with Federal prosecutors investigating gasoline bootlegging and tax-evasion in the New York City area. Laura A. Brevetti, a Federal prosecutor, said yesterday that Mr. Markowitz had admitted being a member of an organized-crime group of East European immigrants in Brooklyn and an associate of Michael Franzese, a captain in the Colombo crime family. Shot at Least Twice
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Federal agents ''are looking into'' the killing, she said.
Another Brooklyn gasoline distributor involved with mobsters in similar tax-skimming deals, Philip Moskowitz, was strangled in 1987. Law-enforcement officials have said they believe he was killed to prevent him from aiding Federal investigators.
The police said Mr. Markowitz had been shot at least twice in the chest at close range while driving on East 66th Street between Strickland Avenue and Ohio Walk at 1 A.M. Mr. Markowitz, who lived at 455 East 86th Street in Manhattan, once lived in Mill Basin.
Mr. Markowitz, a native of Rumania, came to the United States from Israel in 1979. From 1982 to 1984, prosecutors said, he was one of the chief architects of a scheme that used false documents and bogus companies to pocket about $100 million in excise and sales taxes that had been collected from retail gasoline stations.
