Jan 23 2007
COLOMBO BROTHERS, ACCUSED OF ORGANIZED CRIME ACTIVITIES, BEGIN TRIAL
New York — Chris Colombo’s own lawyer dropped the “S” word right in front of a jury yesterday.
“When you look at him, he looks like he just walked off the set of ‘The Sopranos,’” said the lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, as he made his opening remarks in Colombo’s racketeering trial yesterday.
Chris Columbo enters Federal Court in New York City yesterday. For the Times Herald-Record/PETE FOLEY
Colombo acknowledged the jury with a friendly wave. He was resplendent in a slate-gray suit. His lawyer insisted that Colombo’s just a bookie from the ‘burbs, a regular guy from the Town of Blooming Grove who likes gambling and doesn’t like it when someone owes him money.
But prosecutors say the real Colombo runs an organized-crime outfit that loans money at ruinous interest rates, shakes down legit businesses and uses threats and fear to keep victims in line.
Colombo, 45, and his brother, Anthony, 62, are the sons of the late Joe Colombo, the New York City mob boss who founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League. He claimed that the feds singled out Italian-Americans in organized-crime cases solely because of their heritage.
Schneider didn’t make that argument, but he did suggest that the feds are making a gambler into a Gotti.
“You are not going to see one medical record, you are not going to see one black eye, you are not going to see one hangnail of any victim here,” Schneider told the jury. “He’s a bookie. He’s not an extortionist. He’s not a loan shark.”
The trial’s expected to last about two months. Prosecutor Lisa Baroni told the jury yesterday that the Colombos and their four co-defendants concentrated their crimes in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. But court papers show that the trial will also expose links between illegal gamblers in the mid-Hudson and organized crime in New York City. Baroni said she’ll prove that a Middletown man named Phillip “Fat Phil” DioGuardi was Chris Colombo’s bagman. DioGuardi, she said, made regular trips from gambling “wire rooms” in Manhattan to Chris Colombo’s home in Orange County. It was at home, she said, that Colombo stashed piles of ill-gotten cash.
Anthony Colombo’s lawyer, Louis Fasulo, will speak to the jury today. Fasulo yesterday objected to a name that prosecutors gave the operation: The Colombo Brothers Crew. He said they’d invented the name, he called it prejudicial for the jury to hear the name, and Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said she doubted that anyone had Colombo Brothers Crew T-shirts printed, “or little hats with initials on them.”
By Oliver Mackson, Times Herald-Record , January 18, 2007 , http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070118/NEWS/701180325
I Know Chris very very well and he is a loving man with a great heart! Leave him alone !
i no chris to hedont do half of the stuff out here like drug dealers or killers do watch themnot him