Feds Charge Gambino Gangsters with Extorting Condo Tenants

Gambino gangsters controlled a condo board in Queens and extorted tens of thousands of dollars in bogus and inflated fees from owners when they tried to move, the feds say.

Testifying at the trial of reputed hit man Charles Carneglia, former residents of the Greentree Condominiums in Ozone Park said they were slammed with steep last-minute charges for "failure to comply with condo bylaws."

Federal prosecutors allege Carneglia conspired with several mob associates on the board - including local Realtor Joseph Panzarella Sr. and former president Robert Porto - to gouge the residents.

The Greentree development features attached and unattached townhouses which range in price from about $250,000 to more than $400,000.

Right before he was due to close on the sale of his two-bedroom duplex in 2001, UPS driver Joseph Mauro said he was blind-sided with a $47,517.47 bill from the board for fees and fines he supposedly owed.

The fines included $6,000 for "animal excrement thrown from the balcony daily" from 1996 to 2001, nearly $9,000 in water and sewer assessment fees and $1,792 for "collection of" water and sewer assessment fees.

"Were you ever told that your tenants were throwing animal excrement off the balcony?" asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Evan Morris.

Mauro said there were never any prior complaints about his tenants' dog. He said the "violations" began in 1996, the year he was voted off the board after having replaced a maintenance company the government contends was operated by a reputed Gambino associate.

Brian Crowley, a carpenter foreman married to an NYPD officer, testified that not long after he bought Mauro's condo for $240,000, he ran into problems with Porto.

"I went to ask him questions about elections and tax-revenue papers that are supposed to be given to us as owners... He had mentioned that I should stop asking so many questions because I was involving more people in my questions," Crowley explained.

Even Gambino associate Kevin McMahon - a member of Carneglia's crew and once considered boss John Gotti's good luck charm - claims he, too, was scammed by Greentree officials.

The feds on Thursday played a taped 2000 conversation intercepted from McMahon's cell phone in which he bitterly complained about Panzarella hitting him with a $2,000 water bill when he was selling his apartment.

"He's gonna die, that pr--," McMahon said. "He's dying and I can't wait. I'm gonna go to the funeral and laugh. Go stick the water bill under his f-- neck."

McMahon, a turncoat witness, testified that he bought his Greentree condo from Gotti's son, John A. (Junior) Gotti.

Only Carneglia has been charged in the shakedown scheme, which the feds say operated from at least 1999 to 2004.

Panzarella Sr. is deceased; his son Joseph Panzarella Jr., also described as a Gambino associate, declined to comment, said his lawyer, Jessie James Burke.

Thanks to John Marzulli

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Mob Informant Testifies that Actor Was Mobster On and Off the Screen

GOODFELLAS star FRANK SIVERO had links to real life mafia bosses and hitmen, a mob informant has testified in court.

On Wednesday (18Feb09), a New York court was shown photographs of Sivero posing with Charles Carneglia, who is on trial charged with five murders, including the slaying of an off-duty cop. Prosecution witness Kevin McMahon claims Sivero - who played Frankie Carbone in the 1990 movie - was a regular visitor at the Brooklyn junkyard where cops believe Carneglia dissolved the bodies of his victims in acid. And he suggested the 57-year-old actor, who is not accused of any crime, used his underworld connections to settle vendettas. McMahon, a former associate of jailed New York crime boss John Gotti, told the court, "(Sivero) had some kind of problem with somebody in jail, I am not exactly positive." When approached by the New York Daily News, Sivero's agent Mitchell Shankman declined to comment.

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The Mob's Roach Motel

Kevin McMahon never had a chance. Both his parents were junkies.

McMahon was born addicted to heroin, he said Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court. Then, when he was 6, Mommy and her boyfriend killed Daddy. Mommy went away. Grandma took little Kevin in for a few years, but she couldn't handle him in their rough East New York neighborhood, so when, he said, he was 12 or 13, she threw him out into it. He slept in alleys and yards, and one day, he found a cabana and went inside. He was discovered by the owner. The good news: The owner and his wife took Kevin into their home, and over time, they essentially adopted him.

The bad news: The owner was top John Gotti hit man John Carneglia. And he took Kevin right under his gun-bearing wing.

A teenager. Perfect chum. Just the age when kids with not enough love or luck are feeling the most vulnerable. And McMahon isn't the only one the Mafia grabbed at this impressionable age. Peter Zucarro, who also testified at the ongoing trial of mob hit man Charles Carneglia, John's younger brother, said that he was about 13 when neighborhood mobsters started giving him money for doing errands, sucking him in. "I wanted to be just like them," Zucarro said.

One problem: The mob is like a Roach Motel. You crawl in, but you can't crawl out.

Both Zucarro and McMahon and other informants have referred to themselves as "property." The capos owned them. In this democracy, they volunteered to live in a military dictatorship. They obeyed any order. Anything to feel like they belonged.

It's like the story of the child soldiers in Africa, kidnapped and then rewarded for killing. In his great book "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," Ishmael Beah tells of a contest the grownups would hold between the kids "for who could slice the prisoners' throats quickest. ...A lot of things were done with no reason or explanation. Sometimes we were asked to leave in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and start the movie where we left off as if we had just returned from intermission."

In the mob, you followed orders or you would be killed, as anyone who has a TV set knows. But with law enforcement's ongoing destruction of the Italian-American Mafia, why do we care? Because youth gangs have filled the void. "There are now a million gang members in the U.S., up 200,000 since 2005," according to a report released last week by the National Gang Intelligence Center, and they commit 80% of crimes in some communities.

The MS-13 gang, with roots in El Salvador, is particularly brutal, and many gangs are using the Internet "to develop working relationships with foreign drug traffickers."

"Gangs give a sense of feeling safe, of discipline, of belonging," FBI gang expert Linda Schmidt has said. Schmidt recommends that the government fund programs "that our young people can turn to" and that they be "24/7 - like gangs are."

Thanks to Joanna Molloy

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Memo to Mobsters: Don't "Adopt" Anyone - He May Turn Out to be a Rat

Memo to mobsters: Don't "adopt" anyone - he may turn out to be a rat.

John A. (Junior) Gotti learned that the hard way with "adopted" son Lewis Kasman, who taped Gotti family meetings for the feds.

Reputed killer Charles Carneglia is about to get a taste of the same medicine with "adopted" kid brother Kevin McMahon.

Both mob turncoats are to testify in Carneglia's ongoing murder trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.

Kasman, a former Long Island garment exec who wormed his way into Gotti's inner circle and called himself the adopted son of the late Gambino crime boss, wasn't close to Carneglia.

McMahon was as close as you can get without being a relative. "When Kevin walks into that courtroom I would expect Charles will want to jump over the table and strangle him," a law enforcement official said.

McMahon was not only a member of Carneglia's crime crew, he was like a member of the Carneglia family.

In 1980, McMahon was a 12-year-old Irish kid from Howard Beach "at the beginning of his long and extraordinarily close relationship" with Charles Carneglia and his brother John, court papers show. McMahon is 20 years younger than Charles, 62, and John, 64.

On a fateful day in March, McMahon lent his minibike to mob scion Frank Gotti who was accidentally hit and killed by neighbor John Favara as he drove home from work. Favara was slain on Gotti's orders and, prosecutors say, Charles Carneglia dissolved his body in a barrel of acid.

Before the incident, McMahon had been "informally adopted" by John and Charles Carneglia. Charles Carneglia promised to protect the lad from retaliation for his role in Frankie's death.

McMahon was treated as a member of the Carneglia family, living with them for long stretches, attending family dinners and going on Carneglia family vacations, Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Burlingame said.

Former capo Michael DiLeonardo has testified that McMahon was a "goofy kid" who taunted FBI agents, running up to them and grabbing his crotch.

McMahon had jobs with Local 638 steamfitters union and Local 52 motion pictures mechanics union, but those paid only $40,000 a year, chump change for a wanna-be Gambino associate with an ailing wife and two kids.

Prosecutors say he and Carneglia took part in extortions, art fraud and robberies, including the stickup of an armored car at Kennedy Airport in 1990 in which guard Jose Rivera Delgado was shot to death. McMahon dropped a baseball cap at the scene. DNA tests linked him to a strand of hair in the hat.

Shortly after he was arrested in 2005 on an indictment charging him with racketeering for the Gambinos in Tampa, McMahon sent a "thank you" letter to Brooklyn Magistrate Robert Levy for releasing him on bail.

"As I was leaving the courtroom you said to me, 'Don't let me down.' I assure you I have not," he wrote. "As soon as I'm acquitted I'll write you again."

McMahon turned on his adoptive mob family after he was convicted and faced 20 years behind bars. He is cooperating in hopes of winning a lesser prison term.

Thanks to John Marzulli

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Four Gambinos Convicted in Tampa

Friends of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Ronald "Ronnie One-Arm" Trucchio, Steven Catalano, Kevin McMahon, Terry Scaglione

A federal jury in Tampa has found four men guilty of various crimes related to the Gambino Mafia family.

Ronald J. Trucchio (Ronnie One-Arm), Steven Catalano, Kevin M. McMahon, and Terry L. Scaglione were found guilty of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations ("RICO") statute.

The jury also found Scaglione guilty of one count of extortion. Trucchio and Catalano each face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. McMahon and Scaglione each face a maximum sentence of twenty years' imprisonment.

Trucchio, Catalano, and McMahon are now in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Scaglione remains free on bond pending his sentencing hearing.

Sentencing hearings for all four defendants have been set for March 2, 2007.

The US Attorney's Office says during the last 20 years, Catalano, McMahon, Scaglione, Trucchio were under the control of the Gambino Organized Crime Family of La Cosa Nostra in Tampa. The Gambino Crime Family is one "family" in a nationwide criminal organization commonly referred to as "La Cosa Nostra," or the "Mafia."

Federal officials say Trucchio was a captain in Family and he supervised the wide-ranging criminal activities of the crew. The crew's principal purpose was to generate money for its members and associates through the commission of various criminal acts.

The jury felt Trucchio supervised the crew that engaged in multiple acts and threats involving murder, robbery, extortion, dealing in controlled substances, interference with commerce by threats and violence, interstate travel in aid of racketeering enterprises, making extortionate extensions of credit, collection of extensions of credit by extortionate means, and interstate transportation of stolen property.

The Pinellas Resident Agency of the Tampa Field Office of the FBI, the Miami and Brooklyn-Queens Metropolitan FBI offices, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, the Tampa Police Department, the New York City Police Department, the Queens County District Attorney's Office, the FBI Legal Attache to Brazil, the Brazilian federal police, and Interpol coordinated this investigation.

Thanks to WTSP

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