Five Families of New York City

Updated news on the Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese and Colombo Organized Crime Families of New York City.

Showing posts with label Joseph D'Angelo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph D'Angelo. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Gambino rat apologizes to talk radio host Curtis Sliwa for botched murder attempt

  July 10, 2012    Dapper_Don


A mob turncoat was sentenced Tuesday to time served after apologizing to one of his victims, Guardian Angels founder and talk-radio host Curtis Sliwa.
"I want to apologize to Mr. Sliwa and his family," said former Gambino wiseguy Joseph "Little Joey" D'Angelo, 43, as he turned and pointed towards Sliwa who in the back of the courtroom.
In 1992 Sliwa was kidnapped and shot several times in a stolen taxi being driven by D'Angelo, then a young mob associate whose mentor had been Gambino underboss Salvatore "Sammy Bull" Gravano.
D'Angelo testified the attack was ordered by John A. "Junior" Gotti because Sliwa bad-mouthed his father, John "Dapper Don" Gotti, on the radio.
"To his credit he cooperated," said Sliwa during a victim impact statement before Manhattan Federal Court Judge Shira Scheindlin.
In his remarks, Sliwa also told D'Angelo "you did the right thing" but now wanted him to say in public he ratted out the Gambino mob.
"When you do that then maybe for the first time in my life I can forgive and forget," Sliwa said.
The sentence means the mob snitch spent about four years in prison for two mob murders, the Sliwa attack, construction industry shakedowns, securities fraud, drug trafficking and other crimes.
Prosecutors said D'Angelo deserved credit for his "exemplary cooperation" which included testifying against Junior Gotti at four trials in five years, all of which ended in hung juries.
D'Angelo turned on the mob before the first Gotti trial in 2005 and has been free on bail since 2007.

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Gambino informant sentenced to time served for extraordinary cooperation

  July 10, 2012    Dapper_Don

He’s a super rat.
A mob informant who turned on John “Junior” Gotti two weeks before they were slated to stand trial together was sentenced today to time served by a judge who hailed his “truly extraordinary” cooperation with the feds.
Former Gambino crime family soldier Joseph “Little Joey” D’Angelo “seems to have really turned his life around” since switching sides in 2005 and helping bring down at least 40 “violent and dangerous” gangsters, Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin said.
“He’s surely burned his bridges with his former partners in crime,” she added.
D’Angelo — who pleaded guilty to a slew of racketeering crimes, including two mob murders — even got a measure of thanks from one of his victims, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who survived a 1992 attempted hit in which D’Angelo served as the driver.
Sliwa said D’Angelo “was the only one who could tell my story” because triggerman Michael Yannotti stuck to the Mafia code of silence about Sliwa’s taxicab kidnapping and shooting on the Lower East Side.
D’Angelo — a government-protected witness who Scheindlin said was running a “pizza restaurant business” with his fiancee — said: “I want everyone to know my life of crime is behind me. I feel thankful for the opportunity to start again.”
Also yesterday, a reputed Gambino associate who claims to suffer from “debilitating” back pain was locked up for allegedly going on a “rampage” against a pal he blamed for his impending trip to the slammer.
Robert “Cousin Bobby” Napolitano kicked a chair into his buddy’s TV set, then tossed a snack table at his head during the June 15 dust-up in Elmont, Long Island, FBI agent Robert Herbster testified.
Manhattan federal Judge Richard Berman revoked Napolitano’s $2 million bond, saying his violence put the lie to claims that spinal arthritis, “severe degenerative disc disease” and other ailments left Napolitano too ill to spend up to four-plus years behind bars for serving as a mob enforcer and debt collector.

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Monday, June 11, 2012

Feds urge judge to go easy on former Gambino member

  June 11, 2012    Dapper_Don

A mob turncoat who testified over four trials that John A. "Junior" Gotti ordered the 1992 attack on Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa has been an “exemplary cooperating witness,” the feds said Monday.
In new court papers, prosecutors urged a Manhattan judge to go easy on the snitch, former Gambino mobster Joseph "Little Joey" D’Angelo, when he is sentenced July 10.
Sliwa was shot several times at point-blank range and gravely wounded when he was ambushed in a taxi being driven by D’Angelo.
The shooter was a mob associate who was hiding in the cab when Sliwa got in it.
Prosecutors say it was payback for Sliwa badmouthing Gotti’s father.
Junior Gotti’s four trials over five years ended in hung juries.

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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Gambino turncoat awaits sentencing for his role as a cabby in assualt of Guardian Angel

  February 29, 2012    Dapper_Don

Cropped version of photo. West Indian Day para...A murderous mob rat who tried to help the feds bring down John “Junior” Gotti will soon reap his reward.
A judge yesterday set a July 10 sentencing for ex-Gambino soldier Joseph “Little Joey” D’Angelo, who switched sides in 2005 just ahead of his trial alongside the son of “Dapper Don” John Gotti.
D’Angelo admitted serving as a fake cabdriver in the 1992 abduction and near-fatal shooting of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, which D’Angelo said came after the younger Gotti ordered a “hospital beating” for Sliwa as revenge for bad-mouthing his dad on the radio.
But the younger Gotti was never convicted, scoring four hung juries by claiming he quit the mob after pleading guilty to racketeering in 1999.
Sliwa said yesterday that he owed D’Angelo a “wink” for confirming his account of the shooting, but added: “He knew what they were planning to do with me, so for that he should burn in Hell without an asbestos suit for perpetuity.”
D’Angelo, who’s admitted committing two mob murders, also testified that he inadvertently sparked the notorious 1989 killing of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst by telling a buddy to protect his store from an expected black gang.
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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Update: Vincent Basciano Trial

  November 08, 2009    Dapper_Don

After Dominick Cicale testified in the case of John A. Gotti Jr., Vincent Basciano's lawyers are asking the government to turnover docuemnts which show the movement of Basciano and Gotti when they were both lodged at the Metropolitan Correction Center.  This was the period in "King of The Godfather's "when Basciano in Chapter 28 has been arrested but before he went into solitary.  Cicale testified that Basciano had a conversation with Gotti and related that the Gambino mobster said "that with the current times and all the government informants, all the wiretaps, that is is foolish for us not to admit that organized crime exists." Cicale testified further that Gotti told Basciano he was going to argue that he had no part of organized crime and that Joey D'Angelo would testify Gotti had quit the life.  The government is trying to show that Gotti's defense is a ruse.

http://tonydestefano.com/id3.html

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Informant Testifies Against Junior Gotti

  October 22, 2009    Dapper_Don

Former Gambino soldier Joseph "Little Joey" D'Angelo testified "that Gotti approached him in jail in late 2004 and urged breaking the traditional taboo on admitting the mob's existence in order to fight a racketeering indictment the two men faced" as reported by John Riley for Newsday:
Joseph D'Angelo"John said the usual way of us fighting cases is over," D'Angelo told jurors in federal court in Manhattan. Instead, Gotti proposed one of them taking the stand "to say, 'I'm a member of a family, but I've been in jail for years, what have I done?'" Gotti assured him that Gambino family elders and Vincent Basciano, the head of the Bonanno family, among others, had blessed the new approach, and said he could just lie about any criminal activity he was asked about, D'Angelo testified. But D'Angelo, who became an informant in 2005, concluded that the tactic might be tolerated for a bigwig like Gotti, but not for him. * * * Basciano, who prosecutors say was in the federal lockup in Manhattan at the same time as Gotti in 2004, has also advanced a withdrawal defense in court. Gotti, D'Angelo testified, said Basciano told him in 2004, "I'm following your lead."
Federal prosecutors today "also introduced new audio evidence to try to prove that Gotti was still trying to collect a loan-sharking debt years after his alleged withdrawal from the mob, and within five years of his 2008 indictment":
In an August 2003 recorded conversation with his sister Angel at Raybrook federal prison, Gotti tells her that his cousin Peter Gotti owes him $20,000. Then, in a 2007 conversation an informant recorded with the cousin, Peter complains about Gotti's refusal to forgive the loan, and about pressure from Gotti's brother, also named Peter. "He didn't do nothing for me," the cousin complains on the recording. "So then he starts sending Peter. . . . Peter says he's gonna, he's gonna beat up my friends if I don't do the right thing."

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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Informants say Junior Gotti Colluded Legal Defense with Vinny Gorgeous

  October 21, 2009    Dapper_Don

U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Castel ruled yesterday that prosecutors "will be allowed to present testimony Wednesday that Gotti and Bonanno family boss Vincent Basciano colluded in 2004 to construct legal defenses that they had withdrawn from the mob" as reported by John Riley for Newsday:
 [The judge] will allow two informants - Gambino family soldier Joseph D'Angelo and Bonanno family capo Dominick Cicale - to testify that Gotti and Basciano told them they had consulted on the plan. "We need to come up with a new way of defending," prosecutor Elie Honig quoted Gotti as telling D'Angelo in a jailhouse conversation after he and Gotti were indicted in a racketeering conspiracy in 2004. Both informants, Honig said, will testify that they were assured that admitting the mob's existence had been cleared, and that by denying they had engaged in crime for five years they would fall outside the statute of limitations on racketeering. "Don't worry about it," Honig said Basciano told Cicale. "I've discussed it with John Gotti Junior, and Junior's going to have Joey D'Angelo do the same type of thing."  * * * Castel's ruling, not unexpected, came after a day in which prosecutors played a series of 2003 prison tapes in which Gotti rants about his disgust with the treachery of gang life as a lawyer describes the need to "plant the seeds" for the legal claim that he has withdrawn from organized crime.
Junior's former driver and a one-time Bonanno family capo will testify beginning today that Gotti's claim of Mafia retirement is a ruse designed to beat his racketeering case. Joseph (Little Joey) D'Angelo will appear first, saying Gotti told him in July 2004 that the way to beat any mob rap was through the "withdrawal defense." Dominick Cicale will follow, testifying that he heard the same thing about Junior that year during a conversation with now-jailed Bonanno boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano. The timing is crucial to the government case. The feds must prove that Gotti's criminal activities with the Gambino family continued through 2003 - or Junior can beat the case through the statute of limitations. Gotti, 45, facing his fourth trial in five years, says he quit the mob a decade ago.
Further reporting:

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