This Week In Gang Land July 22, 2010

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By Jerry Capeci
Feds To Jackie Nose: Here's
An Offer You Can't Refuse


Even if onetime acting Gambino family boss John (Jackie Nose) D’Amico had nothing to do with the murder he’s charged with, the longtime John Gotti pal will likely decide that the feds just made him an offer he can’t refuse: In exchange for a guilty plea to attempted assault, and a sentence of less than three years behind bars, the veteran mobster can put it all behind him.

Sources say that assistant U.S. attorney Miriam Rocah, the chief mob prosecutor for the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, has offered the 74-year-old D’Amico the sweet deal to cover his alleged role in the 1989 execution murder of businessman Fred Weiss, a former executive of the Staten Island Advance newspaper.

The feds have already nailed a slew of wiseguys in the shooting of Weiss in front of his home, including top members of the DeCavalcante family who carried out the hit as a favor to Gotti. The late Dapper Don turned to the New Jersey crew after his own minions failed to kill Weiss, botched efforts that included nearly a dozen underlings, including Jackie Nose and a feared family hitman, Joseph Watts, 68.

At the time, Gotti feared that Weiss, who also owned a recycling company, would cooperate with an ongoing investigation into the private sanitation industry and implicate capo James (Jimmy Brown) Failla – the family’s member on the trade waste association that controlled the industry throughout the New York area – in criminal activity.

D’Amico, and Watts (left) – who sources say has been offered a decidedly less favorable deal of ten years in prison – are scheduled for trial in September on the 18-month-old case.

Neither Rocah nor D’Amico’s attorney responded to repeated requests for comment about the plea offer. But sources say that if Jackie Nose pleads guilty to attempted assault in aid of racketeering, a charge that carries a cap of three years, it would satisfy all charges against him in the murder and racketeering conspiracy indictment.

“The plea for Jackie is a no-brainer,” said one defense lawyer not involved in the case. “He faces more than three years on the other stuff in the indictment,” said the attorney, referring to extortion and money laundering charges that D’Amico is also charged with.

D’Amico’s other alleged crime are standard shakedown stuff: Starting in the early 1980s and continuing until 2008, according to the indictment, D’Amico “extorted restaurants and supermarket chains” for protection payoffs and forced the businesses “to place orders with suppliers” who were affiliated with the Gambino family.

As is often the case in mob shakedowns, the crime family, in the person of Jackie Nose, also received payoffs and other favors from the favored suppliers whose wares found their way into the eateries and groceries controlled by the Gambinos, according to the indictment.

From one key supplier, Big Geyser Inc., probably the city’s largest distributor of bottled “juices, teas, waters and nutritional soft drinks,” D’Amico received health benefits and a yearly stipend that reached $71,000 when the indictment was filed. He also secured a distribution route for the late Dapper Don’s son, John (Junior) Gotti when he was acting boss in the mid 1990s, according to the indictment.

In return, D’Amico gave Big Geyser “permission” to distribute its fine products – Poland Spring, Pellegrino, Perrier, Crystal Geyser and Saratoga Water to name just five – to Gambino family businesses. Back in the 1980s, Jackie & Company also helped Big Geyser’s owner, Irving Hershkowitz (a.k.a. “Hal Irving”), distribute alcoholic beverages to the crime family’s restaurants, according to the indictment.

When you factor in the ten months D’Amico has ready spent behind bars awaiting trial – he completed a two year prison stretch for racketeering last fall – and the 55 days a year good time off that all inmates receive, D’Amico would serve about 20 more months behind bars if, as Gang Land expects, he goes along with the deal.

Watts, who has been behind bars for one reason or another for about 12 of the last 15 years, completes a two year stretch in November for what he thought were secret meetings at a Brooklyn eatery with a Gambino capo following an earlier federal conviction.

The wealthy and violent gangster – he has made many millions of dollars as a loanshark and entrepreneur while serving as a hitman for three Gambino family bosses, according to court records – is not likely to consider any offer from the feds until Manhattan Federal Judge Colleen McMahon upholds the validity of the indictment against Watts.

In 1996, as part of a negotiated plea deal with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn – much like the one their Manhattan counterparts have proposed to D’Amico – Watts received assurances that they would not prosecute him for the Weiss killing if he pleaded guilty to another Gotti-ordered slaying of another potential witness against Jimmy Brown Failla.

In court papers, Watts claims that the feds are reneging on their deal: Charging him with the murder of Weiss in Manhattan 12 years later is unfair, he says, since it violates the double jeopardy protections in the Constitution, and violates the spirit – if not the letter – of the plea deal he made with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.

Attorney Gerald Shargel declined to discuss any plea offer his client may have received, or the pretrial motions that are pending. “I’m preparing for trial, period,” he said.


Sally Fish Fingers Mob Capo;
Defense: Fish's Tale Is Fishy
Does the government go after wiseguys who decide not to cooperate?

That’s the thinking behind an all-out legal street fight now raging at the racketeering trial of Genovese capo Anthony (Tico) Antico (right) in Brooklyn. There, the government’s only witness against the aging gangster has twice taken the stand – both times to point the finger at Antico for orchestrating the botched robbery slaying of a jeweler on Staten Island in 2008.

In his appearances, Salvatore (Sally Fish) Maniscalco, who began selling pot in the Sunnyside section of Staten Island when he was 12 and later moved up to extortion, coke dealing, home invasions and jewelry store robberies, testified that Antico was the prime mover in the caper.

Under gentle leading by prosecutor Nicole Argentieri, Mansicalco, 36, who described himself as a Colombo associate, said that Antico outlined a “half a million” dollar robbery of a guy they both knew as Lou The Jeweler about 10 days before April 29, 2008. That was the day that jeweler Louis Antonelli was shot and killed by a trigger-happy gang that Sally Fish had put together.

“He told me I had a score for you to do, so I said all right,” said Maniscalco. (left) He testified that the conversation took place during a 10 minute walk-talk in South Beach after Antico stepped out of a four-door Mercedes Benz and handed him a black bag that contained a cell phone and charger.

“Keep it charged. Don’t call nobody. About a week and a half from now you will get a call where and when to go,” Antico allegedly told him, before being driven away in the black Mercedes, according to Sally Fish’s tale.

During a grueling cross examination, Maniscalco, who said he had only met Antico once before at a chance meeting two months earlier, never wavered about that key testimony. Even when defense lawyer Gerald McMahon confronted him with different stories that Sally Fish had allegedly told his girlfriend or fellow inmates about the crime, and when the lawyer belittled the tale as preposterous, the turncoat hung tough.

“So this is a guy that you’ve had maybe five or ten minutes of conversation with your entire life, and he’s going to trust you to set up a robbery of someone that’s around him!” McMahon asked incredulously?

“Yes,” said Sally Fish.

McMahon fared a little better with complaints that Argentieri, John Buretta, the chief of the U.S. Attorney’s organized crime unit, and FBI agents on the prosecution team, George Khouzami and Jennifer King, played fast and loose with their obligations to disclose favorable information to the defense, especially about key witness Maniscalco.

Trial Judge Carol Amon stated that the “government should have been clearer” and disclosed in typewritten reports – not in hard-to-decipher handwritten notes – that Maniscalco had not implicated Antico in his first talk with the feds. The judge ordered prosecutors to bring the witness, who first testified last Friday, for a second round of cross-examination this week.

Throughout the trial, the always hard-charging McMahon has made it very clear to the jury that he believes that FBI agents made a case against his client because he refused to cooperate with them, and that prosecutors are pushing the case forward for their own personal glory.

In his first remarks to the jury, he focused on two visits FBI agents made to his client while he was in prison: “In November of 2009 and January of 2010, the government made Anthony Antico an offer that he couldn’t refuse, and he refused it. And that’s why we’re here today.”

Later, he included the prosecutors as co-conspirators in the drive against his client.

“For law enforcement,” said McMahon, “the Mafia is a virtual mother’s milk. You get publicity, you get promotions, agents get promoted, prosecutors became mayors, governors, whatever. And because of the lure and the allure of the Mafia and the prosecutions, what sometimes is just an ordinary street crime – a robbery, gambling – by ordinary street criminals, becomes something different, something bigger. It becomes a racketeering charge. And that’s precisely what we have here.”

Asked point blank by Judge Amon whether he was trying to establish that the case was “a vendetta against Mr. Antico for failing to cooperate,” McMahon (left) responded: “Precisely.”

Citing his opening statement and his response to the judge, prosecutors Argentieri, Jack Dennehy and Stephen Frank asked Amon to preclude McMahon from making similar arguments about the “government’s purported motives in bringing this prosecution” in his summation to the jury.

In addition to setting up the fatal robbery, Antico, 74, is charged with gambling, loansharking and extortion from the mid 1990s until 2008.

The government rested yesterday. Closing arguments are scheduled for tomorrow. The case should get to the jury early next week.

Accused FBI Informer Alerted Feds About Judge Death Plot
Longtime FBI informer Joseph Barone, who is on trial for a $1 million insurance murder plot, alerted the feds that an imprisoned Bonanno family chieftain was planning to kill a Brooklyn federal judge and a top mob prosecutor four years ago, Gang Land has learned.

Sources say Barone was responsible for turning over “credible” information that former acting boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano had drafted a hit list of five targets that was headed by Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis and former assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Andres.

Barone, who publicly disclosed his informant status as part of on unusual "public authority" defense strategy, is charged in a murder for hire plot along with a wealthy New Rochelle businessman-pal, Anthony Piliero, who was the beneficiary of a $1 million life insurance policy that he had taken out on an employee.

At the time, a few months after Basciano was convicted of racketeering charges in May, 2006, Barone, who began working as an FBI informer in 1993, disclosed that Vinny Gorgeous had also marked his former right-hand-man-in crime, capo Dominick Cicale, and two other mob turncoats for execution.

“The information turned out to be credible, and we acted accordingly,” said one law enforcement source not involved in the current case against Barone and Piliero. Basciano, who was later found guilty of a gangland-style murder and awaits yet another trial for another mob hit, has been held in segregated confinement since.

Sources say that in the late 1990s, Barone, the son of a deceased Genovese family wiseguy, also alerted his FBI handler that the mob had put out a contract against onetime enforcer William Marshall, who had begun cooperating against former acting Gambino boss Junior Gotti.

After investigating, the FBI determined that Barone’s report about Marshall was also credible, sources say.

In his opening remarks to the jury Tuesday, Manhattan assistant U.S. attorney John Zach conceded that over the years Barone “was a good informant” who supplied valuable information to the FBI but that from at least 2006 until early 2009, he had been involved in criminal activities that he didn’t tell the FBI about, including the murder plot involving Piliero.

thanks rocco

Thanks for posting this weeks column.


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