Staten Island Home Is Searched for Evidence of Mob Murder
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Published: April 6, 2006
Acting on information provided by a cooperating witness, F.B.I. agents yesterday searched for evidence of a mob murder inside a Victorian mansion on a Staten Island hilltop, according to several law enforcement officials.
Late in the afternoon the agents halted their work at the house, the landmark Kreischer mansion at 4500 Arthur Kill Road in the Charleston section, said several officials, who were granted anonymity because the investigation is continuing. One agent was seen carrying three large plastic garbage bags from the house.
The F.B.I. lab will conduct forensic tests on evidence removed from the building, one of the officials said.
The search was by members of the F.B.I. squad that investigates the Bonanno crime family, several officials said, but they would not disclose the identity of the suspected victim.
Futher details about the case were not available. A woman who came out to the mansion's wrought-iron gate and would not comment or give her name referred questions to the F.B.I. A spokesman for the agency, James Margolin, confirmed the search but would not say whether agents had concluded that a murder had been committed in the mansion.
The Bonanno crime family, which for roughly two decades resisted the government's efforts to get its members to become witnesses, has been riven by defections in recent years.
Among the turncoats were the family's boss, Joseph C. Massino, who began cooperating with federal authorities in 2004, and his brother-in-law and underboss, Salvatore Vitale, who did so in 2003.
In fact, the Kreischer mansion, which was built by Balthasar Kreischer in 1885 for his son Charles, high on a hill overlooking the older man's brickworks, for many years housed a restaurant that was used for meetings by another man identified by the authorities as a Bonanno mobster.
That man, John Zancocchio, 48, who federal authorities have identified as a Bonanno soldier, met with other Bonanno figures and a Gambino family captain at the restaurant in early 1998, according to testimony of F.B.I. agents and a federal probation officer in an unrelated federal case.
Mr. Zancocchio, the son-in-law of the former underboss of the family, is serving a federal prison term after pleading guilty to charges in a 2002 indictment in Miami that also led to the conviction of his father-in-law.
At the time, according to the testimony, the establishment was owned by Joseph and Andrea McBratney. Mr. McBratney, whom the authorities called a Bonanno associate, is the son of James McBratney.
The elder McBratney was slain on Staten Island in the late 70's by John Gotti. The killing earned Mr. Gotti membership in the crime family that he went on to run until his conviction in 1992 on murder and racketeering charges and his death in prison 10 years later.
Nate Schweber contributed reporting for this article.
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Don Cardi
