Apr 20 2007
Witness and Defense Lawyer Tangle in Mob Trial About Couple’s Killing
By his own admission, Michael DiLeonardo is known as Mikey Scars, a captain of the Gambino crime family, bookmaker, loan shark, murderer of three and a Mafia turncoat.
By the estimation of the government in court documents, Joseph R. Corozzo Jr. is house counsel to the Gambinos, scion of the family consigliere and himself a subject of two pending federal criminal investigations.
Though these men are not on trial, they have spent the last three days debating family business in Federal District Court in Brooklyn at the murder trial of a reputed Gambino family figure.
To clarify the scorecard, a managerial-level organized crime figure has been squaring off against his boss’s chief adviser’s son on the significance of Mafia rankings, communication styles, social clubs and criminal activities while jurors, spectators and a table full of prosecutors try to keep up.
The exchange between defense lawyer and prosecution witness has been less than collegial at times.
“I answered that already,” Mr. DiLeonardo said yesterday in response to one question.
“No, you didn’t,” Mr. Corozzo countered.
Though their back-and-forth exchanges have ranged widely, enumerating arcane grudges, forgotten associates and forgettable bar fights from decades of Mafia life, the case that brought them together was memorable enough.
In the early 1990s, prosecutors have said, a young couple named Thomas and Rose Marie Uva humiliated the city’s five crime families with a series of robberies. While Mrs. Uva waited in the car, her husband entered Mafia social clubs with an Uzi, stole money and jewelry, then forced his victims to drop their pants. The robberies ended in December 1992, when the couple was found shot to death near their home in Ozone Park, Queens.
Dominick Pizzonia, a social club proprietor known as Skinny Dom who is suspected of being a Gambino captain, is on trial in the killings. Prosecutors called Mr. DiLeonardo, who is under federal witness protection, to connect Mr. Pizzonia to the crime.
Mr. DiLeonardo, 51, gave his account in the understated manner of a jaded street raconteur. He sat in the courtroom in a sky-blue jacket so bright it appeared to shine. His fluffed hair made him look as Joe Theisman might after decades of getting punched in the face. He employed Mafia lingo and a sort of worn stoicism, describing a beating he once received by saying: “They gave me a little workout. It was fast.”
After one robbery of Mr. Pizzonia’s social club, he testified, Mr. Pizzonia discussed revenge with John A. Gotti, the family boss at the time, who later visited the Bonanno crime family to claim credit.
After his direct testimony, Mr. DiLeonardo was cross-examined for three days by Mr. Corozzo, the lawyer for Mr. Pizzonia. In pretrial motions, prosecutors had sought unsuccessfully to disqualify Mr. Corozzo, who argued that assertions of his Mafia ties had emerged from disreputable sources.
On cross-examination, Mr. Corozzo sought to establish that several crime families had reason to kill the Uvas, while the Gambinos did not always kill sources of humiliation.
Mr. DiLeonardo acknowledged that he had not directly heard the conversations about killing the Uvas. Instead, he said, he had surmised the involvement of Mr. Pizzonia from various coincidences. When the defense lawyer showed discrepancies with his testimony from other trials, Mr. DiLeonardo said he had figured it all out only recently.
“Your memory gets refreshed” Mr. DiLeonardo said, “and you start remembering things more factual.”
Again and again, the defense lawyer emphasized that the witness’s knowledge was secondhand, as in this exchange:
Mr. Corozzo: “You weren’t talking with Dom Pizzonia about that, right?”
Mr. DiLeonardo: “Is that a question or a statement?”
Mr. Corozzo: “It’s a question, with ‘right’ on the end.”
The New York Times Company - April 19, 2007 By MICHAEL BRICK http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=T&ct=us/9-0&fd=R&url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/nyregion/19mob.html&cid=1115513887&ei=6donRr20E5jM0AGnlfnUAQ
