Mafia News

The sheer idiocy of the Uvas and their fate has been the gossip of both the Mafia and New York law enforcement over the 15 years since. First there was the obvious question of what could possibly have persuaded the young couple that their antics, starting in 1991 and extending over more than a year, were anything other than a suicide mission. One clue came from Michael Schussel, who was their boss at the collection agency. On the witness stand at the trial at the Brooklyn District Court, he described the couple as Mafia groupies who had even asked for days off to attend the trial of the Gambino boss John Gotti in 1992. “They were obsessed with the mob,” he testified. One day news of one of their hits made the headlines in New York’s tabloids and, apparently afflicted by the stress, Rosemarie fainted at work. Some weeks later, her husband was fired by the company for fighting with her at work.

But then, of course, there has always been the small matter of who fired the shots. No one ever doubted it was the Mafia visiting the only kind of punishment they were ever likely to consider. In one of the more absurd passages of the trial, however, it emerged that a feud flared between the Gambino and the Bonnano families over which had carried out the double rub-out. It was only settled when John Gotti Jr (who took over as Gambino head after the incarceration of his father), according to prosecutors, ordered a sit-down with his Bonnano opposite number. The killings, he asserted, were definitely a Gambino “trophy”.

At the trial, prosecutors set to be more specific. They argued that at least one of those pulling the trigger in Ozone Park that day was Skinny Dom. And to prove it they produced a van load of cooperating witnesses who had taken plea agreements in return for helping to convict him. Foremost among them was a man who has taken a leading role not just in this Mafia trial but in others before it and, according to sources, will do so again in more to come. That would be Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo, a former Gambino captain. He duly told the jury that Pizzonia indeed carried out the hit and added, for good measure, that it was sanctioned by John Gotti Jr. (An assertion, by the way, that Gotti has denied.)

“He was very angry, as was everybody else, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs,” DiLeonardo explained, adding, that it was “like committing suicide - you’re gonna get clipped if you get caught.” He said Pizzonia had told John that he “was going to go after them”.

For good measure, the case against Pizzonia also included another murder charge going back to 1988. The victim that time was smalltime mobster Frank Boccia who had incurred the wrath of a former right-hand man to John Gotti, Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano, for verbally and physically abusing his wife while he was in prison.

It did not help the prosecution, however, that DiLeonardo was forced to admit on cross-examination that he had identified Pizzonia as the killer in his mind by way of several cryptic conversations with other Gambino captains and with Gotti Jr. He did not seem to have any direct knowledge. Meanwhile, it barely needs to be said that he and the other cooperating witnesses had something of a credibility - or sympathy - gap with jurors. DiLeonardo is not - or, at least, was not - a nice man. While testifying in a trial last year of Gotti Jr, he called himself a “gentleman gangster”, but admitted that he had killed for the Gambinos. He tried contrition, of course. “Sometimes I cried thinking about it. At times I felt remorse, yeah,” he told that jury. “I pray to sanitise my past.”

The outcome, once more, was not what the prosecutors wanted. The jury did not find Pizzonia guilty of murdering Bonnie or Clod. All was not completely lost, however, because he was convicted on associated lesser charges of racketeering and conspiring to kill the young couple. When his sentencing comes on 10 August, he may go to prison for a period of up to 10 years or perhaps less. And he will evade the life-sentence that would have come with a murder conviction. (omega)

The modern-day struggle of wills between the feds and the mob can be traced back to a night in 1985 and the shooting on a Midtown Manhattan street of Paul Castellano, for nine years the godfather of the city’s most powerful crime clan, the Gambinos. The man who succeeded the slain Castellano - and who had orchestrated the hit - was to become an icon of the modern underworld, John Gotti, better known as the “Teflon Don”.

The mowing down of Castellano galvanised the authorities. Of the five main New York families, the Gambinos had always been, and remain, their most urgent prey. They immediately went after Gotti. But he slipped his handcuffs with a surprise acquittal in a 1987 trial, thus earning his non-stick nickname. (Another was “Dapper Don” because of his predilection for perfectly cut suits and hair.) Worse, he was acquitted of murder charges again at a second trial in 1990, further humiliating prosecutors. But in 1992, in a huge coup for the feds, he was finally convicted and put behind bars, where he later died.

No question, the Cosa Nostra of New York is a shadow of what it was even a decade or so ago, when it had its hands around the throats of whole industries, from trucking to rubbish collection, the ports and markets. The Gambino crew extended its tentacles into gambling, loan sharking, and the labour unions. No punishment was too violent for those that showed disrespect - or failed to pay their dues.

What success the government has had is thanks first to a sweeping racketeering law known as Rico. It was the former Mayor of New York and presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, who, a prosecutor at the time, first recognised its usefulness. Passed by Congress in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was pretty much designed to crush the Mafia. The burden for proving that defendants were involved in on-going scams like extortion and murder was set lower for the prosecutors, while the penalties for the guilty were harsh, a minimum of 20 years confinement.

Wielding Rico had a secondary effect. While the Mafia’s vaunted code of silence - or omerta - had remained sacred through generations, suddenly seasoned wise-guys begun to come forward, including Mikey Scars, looking for much reduced sentences for themselves in plea agreements in exchange for testifying for the government against their former associates. Twenty months behind bars with the prospect of retirement in the government’s witness protection programme doesn’t look so bad with prosecutors wreaking Rico havoc. Most famous was the testimony in 1992 of underboss Salvatore ” Sammy the Bull” Gravano, against Gotti. His betrayal put Gotti away and electrified the underworld. In 2005, the feds even scored Joseph “Big Joey” Massino as a witness, once head of the Bonnano family.

That the feds have unfinished business with the mob is made plain by the continuing conveyor belt of trials. Many are as frustrating as the Pizzonia case. But in recent months, prosecutors won convictions against two former New York detectives who for years moonlighted for the Lucchese family, leaking them information about police investigations and even participating in one mobster rub-out. Yet, they were overturned weeks later by the judge on a statute-of-limitations appeal. Last September, meanwhile, a second trial of John Gotti Jr, who stood accused of conspiring to kill Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group, also ended in his acquittal.

By basing their cases on the word of mobster snitches, prosecutors clearly have a problem. It was summed up at the start of last year’s Gotti trial by his defence lawyer, Charles Carnesi. “Everybody who doesn’t want to do his time for a crime that he commits is more than willing to make up a story. We just hope that the government is able to weed out those who deal in fiction rather than fact.” Or as Pizzonia’s lawyer, Joseph Corozzo, put it: “You have to sing for your supper” - before going on to characterise several of the prosecution witnesses on the stand variously as ” a stone-cold liar, con man, cheat and a thief”.

Thus, we begin to understand the difficulties prosecutors have in providing those facts convincingly and in seeking justice for crimes often more than a decade ago. (It might also explain why the writers of The Sopranos had no trouble keeping Tony free of serious intrusion by the feds over an entire six seasons.) It also means that fresh installments of Mafia drama will keep coming to New York’s courts for some time to come. Next up, says journalist Capeci, may be attempt number three by the government to pin something on John Gotti Jr - at which Mikey Scars will almost certainly be a witness.

Meanwhile, just as the feds didn’t get all they wanted at the Skinny Dom trial, so the twin mysteries of the Uvas remain largely unexplained. If Pizzonia didn’t plug them at the intersection in Ozone Park, who did? And still we have no really credible explanation of why they thought shaking down the mob was anything but a terrible idea.

“Why would they do that?” one juror asked outside the courthouse when it was all over. “Why would anybody? I mean, you know.” Indeed.

Gangs of New York: America’s real Sopranos - 10 June 2007 02:44 - http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2619224.ece

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