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 Daniel Cilenti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daniel Cilenti. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Former NYPD cop who helped mob gets 14 months

  March 21, 2012    Dapper_Don

A decorated former cop who ditched the NYPD to become a Genovese grunt was hit with 14 months in prison after a judge slammed him for his role in a mob extortion scheme.
Dominic Caramanica was awarded one of the NYPD’s highest awards for bravery after he was shot and wounded during a drug arrest. But Brooklyn federal Judge John Gleeson reminded Caramanica that those days were long gone.
“It’s astonishing how far you’ve come — from a hero cop to a driver for a gangster,” the judge said.
Gleeson also hit Caramanica with three years probation and fined him $25,000.
“It’s a very serious crime,” the judge said of the mob shakedown scheme “You chose this life, you chose this crime.”
Brooklyn federal prosecutors say Caramanica served as a longtime driver for Genovese soldier Daniel “Uncle Danny” Cilenti, who died of natural causes earlier this year.
Defense attorney James Froccaro sought a reduced sentence, given that the former officer won the NYPD’s Combat Cross medal after he was shot.
Prosecutors countered that Caramanica should face the consequences of his decision to become a gangster.
Caramanica had pleaded guilty to helping to shake down a businessman who owed a debt — by using threats to collect the money.
Caramanica who comes from a family with several generations of NYPD service, was a cop from January 1986 to April 1989.
He retired after he was injured and bullet fragments are still lodged in his spine, his attorney said.

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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Longtime Genovese soldier dies while awaiting trial on racketeering

  March 07, 2012    Dapper_Don

A Genovese crime-family soldier awaiting trial on racketeering and extortion charges has died after a long illness, his attorney said yesterday.
Daniel “Uncle Danny” Cilenti, 84, was inducted into the family in 1947 and rang up arrests for bookmaking, extortion, gambling and impeding a grand-jury probe during a New York crime career that spanned “more than six decades,” Brooklyn federal prosecutors recently wrote.
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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Genovese mobster from Patterson gets 2 years for extortion

  February 18, 2012    Dapper_Don

A reputed Genovese crime family associate from Patterson was sentenced today to two years in federal prison for extorting a construction industry executive.
Peter Pace, 50, who was sentenced in Brooklyn federal court, was among 127 reputed Mafia members and associates charged in a historic FBI takedown in January 2011.
He was charged with extortion and racketeering, accused of conspiring with longtime Genovese soldier Daniel Cilenti, 84, of Yonkers to shake down the executive. They were also charged with extorting a second victim who owned money to the first victim.
Pace is perhaps best known for allegedly settling one family dispute by dangling an adversary — his mother-in-law — from the roof of a six-story Bronx building.
According to federal prosecutors, he was upset that she was telling people that he was going to rob them, going so far as to go call his wife’s mother “a … junkie.”

http://www.lohud.com/article/20120217/NEWS04/120217011/Reputed-mobster-from-Patterson-gets-2-years-extortion
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Friday, February 17, 2012

NYPD cop who won top department honors became Genovese associate

  February 17, 2012    Dapper_Don


As a cop, Dominic Caramanica won the NYPD’s highest award for bravery after he was shot and badly wounded during a drug arrest.
But after leaving the department, Caramanica crossed over to the dark side and became a Genovese crime-family associate.
Caramanica is being sentenced today on mob extortion charges, and his lawyer wants a judge to know about his heroic past — winning the Combat Cross medal after a bullet from a Bronx drug dealer’s gun ripped into his torso, damaged his intestines, an artery and his liver.
Even today, bullet fragments are lodged close to Caramanica’s spine, and he still experiences health problems stemming from the shooting, defense attorney James Froccaro wrote to a Brooklyn federal judge.
But Assistant US Attorney Stephen Frank countered that Caramanica has been a longtime driver for Genovese soldier Daniel “Uncle Danny” Cilenti and that the ex-officer allegedly played a role in a mob-extortion scheme to collect a business debt.
Caramanica “correctly notes that he is a decorated former police officer who was injured in the line of duty,” Frank wrote.
But his “past service to the city of New York should not immunize him from the consequences of his decision to become an associate of organized crime, and to take part in the charged extortion,” the prosecutor contended.
Under a plea deal, Caramanica will face eight to 14 months in prison when he is sentenced by Judge John Gleeson.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/cop_mobber_iveu7DUe4nlv6nEcpf0vkO#ixzz1mf2H10Mu

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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Former MRAA chairman accused of mob ties

  February 09, 2011    Dapper_Don

Mugshot of Charles Luciano at 1936,Italian-Ame...Lucky LucianoThe news that former Marine Retailers Association of America chairman Glenn Mazzella was charged along with 126 others last month as part of a sting against some of the East Coast's most notorious organized crime families seemed to come as a surprise to the industry.
"I was as surprised as most people to read it," MRAA president Phil Keeter told Soundings Trade Only. "You're always surprised to hear those kinds of things, but I knew nothing about it. I had no idea. If he had mob connections, I didn't know it."
Keeter said that after many in the industry learned of the news he received phone calls expressing surprise, along with questions about whether Keeter had any suspicions.
"He was a very good MRAA chairman and he worked very hard at his job," he added. Mazzella was elected to chair the group in 2004 and served through 2006.
Mazzella, according to court documents, is accused of being an "associate" within the Genovese crime family. He and others are charged with racketeering conspiracy involving the extortion of two individuals.
He is alleged to have "knowingly and intentionally" conspired to obtain property by compelling "John Doe No. 1 ... to deliver such property, by instilling in him a fear that if the property was not delivered, one or more persons would cause physical injury to some person in the future and cause damage to property."
Documents also suggest Mazzella and others "did knowingly and intentionally conspire to obstruct, delay and affect commerce, and the movement of articles and commodities in commerce, by extortion in that the defendants and others agreed to obtain property ... from John Doe No. 1, with his consent, which consent was to be induced through wrongful use of actual and threatened force, violence and fear."
Court documents also mention a second "John Doe" who was allegedly threatened by Mazzella and others.
These actions allegedly took place between May 2007 and February 2010, documents show. Others charged along with Mazzella include Peter Pace Jr. and Daniel Cilenti, also known as "Uncle Danny," a soldier and an associate within the Genovese crime family.
Mazzella, according to court documents, poses "a danger to the community and a risk of flight that can only be mitigated, if at all, through substantial bail packages and restrictive conditions of release."
The 127 defendants charged in these cases were rounded up as part of the organized crime families that make up La Cosa Nostra, which operates in numerous cities throughout the country and "routinely engages in violence and threatens violence to extort money from victims, eliminate rivals, settle vendettas and obstruct justice," according to a statement released along with news of the charges.
"This largest single-day operation against La Cosa Nostra sends the message that our fight against traditional organized crime is strong and our commitment is unwavering," U.S. attorney general Eric Holder said in a statement.
Mazzella, who is out on bail, asked the judge to be allowed to travel to the Miami International Boat Show next week, the New York Post reported. His lawyer, Michael Rosen, told the court that Mazzella runs a yacht brokerage in Florida and needs to attend the show for business.
No ruling was immediately made on the request, according to the newspaper.
Keeter said he had no knowledge of this business and court documents do not mention the name of a yacht brokering business in Florida.
According to filings in bankruptcy court, where Mazzella filed last year for Chapter 7 protection, he previously served as president of the now defunct Glenn Marine Family Boating Center Ltd. dealership and did business through an entity named Worldwide Yacht Corp. in which he had an ownership interest.
Worldwide Yacht Corp. was the sole dealer/distributor of Windy boats in the United States.

http://www.tradeonlytoday.com/home/508871-former-mraa-chairman-accused-of-mob-ties

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Thursday, February 3, 2011

Feds: Mobster dangled mother-in-law from roof

  February 03, 2011    Dapper_Don

Disputes within organized- crime families that are settled through violence are legendary.

After all, the most notorious mobster of recent vintage, John Gotti, ascended to the top spot in the Gambino crime family by rubbing out former boss Paul Castellano in 1985 outside Sparks Steak House in midtown Manhattan.
But the crime family is not the only one that sees violence when reputed wiseguys set out to settle scores, federal prosecutors say. Sometimes it reaches into the mobsters' homes.
Take the case of Peter Pace, a 49-year-old reputed Genovese crime family associate charged along with 126 other reputed Mafia members and associates in last month's historic FBI takedown.
Pace, who lives in Patterson, is alleged to have settled one family dispute by dangling an adversary from the roof of a six-story Bronx building.
That adversary was not another mobster, though. It was his mother-in-law, federal prosecutors say.
Pace was said to be upset that his mother-in-law was telling people that he was going to rob them. In an expletive-laden diatribe recounted in court papers by federal prosecutors, Pace called his wife's mother "a ... junkie."
"I tried to throw her off the roof on Viewmont Avenue back in 1988," he said, according to court papers. He reputedly said she was trying to "set me up with the neighborhood."
"So I brought her up to the ... roof about six stories ... I hung her off the ... side of the roof," he said.
In an indictment unsealed Jan. 20, Pace was charged along with three other men with extortion. He also was charged with racketeering.
Prosecutors said Pace conspired with reputed longtime Genovese soldier Daniel Cilenti, 83, of Yonkers to shake down a construction industry executive. They are also charged with extorting a second victim who owed money to the first victim.
In that case, they are alleged to have enlisted the aid of Dominic Caramanica, a retired New York City police officer from Suffern, to pay a visit to the second victim so that the "message will be sent," Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Frank quoted one defendant as saying about Caramanica's visit.
Caramanica's lawyer, James Frocarro said Caramanica "pled not guilty and is presumed innocent."
A lawyer for Pace, who also pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn Federal Court, did not respond to requests for comment.
Frank asked that Pace be held without bail, citing his assault conviction in 1991 in Westchester County Court for which Pace was sentenced to 1 1/2 to 4 1/2 years in prison.
Pace is alleged to have told an extortion victim that he had shot a man and sustained several bullet wounds himself, according to court papers.
Caramanica and Pace each face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Pace was released on $1.5 million bond, and Caramanica on $1 million bond.

http://www.lohud.com/article/20110203/NEWS02/102030392/-1/newsfront/Feds--Mobster-dangled-mother-in-law-from-roof

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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Feds: Age didn’t deter mobster suspect Daniel Cilenti, 83

  January 27, 2011    Dapper_Don

When most of his octogenarian compatriots might have long retired, 83-year-old Daniel Cilenti was still hard at work.

Too hard, federal prosecutors say.
Cilenti, prosecutors say, has been a Genovese family soldier since the Truman administration, and was accused of shaking down a construction industry figure, forcing him to pony up if he wanted any work in the metro area.
The Yonkers man was among the oldest of the 127 reputed mob members and associates charged last week in a historic crackdown by federal authorities.
Cilenti told a man who turned out to be a mob informant that he was formally inducted into the Genovese family in 1947 — the same year Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and Perry Como's "Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba" topped the Billboard charts.
"Now that's real old, old school," said Jack Garcia, the retired FBI agent who infiltrated the Gambino crime family in Westchester County several years ago and helped bring down the entire hierarchy of that organization. "Guys like that never want to hear the word 'retirement.' "
Cilenti's arrest record goes back to 1961, the year Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record and President John F. Kennedy took office.
Cilenti, whose nickname according to federal authorities is "Uncle Danny," pleaded not guilty to racketeering and extortion charges in federal court in Brooklyn. He was released on $1 million bond.
His lawyer, Joel Cohen, did not return calls.
"Cilenti has thus, by his own account, been a member of this notoriously violent and dangerous criminal enterprise for more than six decades," Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen E. Frank wrote in court papers that revealed Cilenti's alleged mob membership.
His first conviction was in 1961 in the Bronx for possessing bookmaking records. He was arrested two more times in the next four years for the same crime, but both cases were dismissed.
He was charged again in 1975, this time in a gambling conspiracy case filed by federal prosecutors. But they dropped the prosecution.
In 1988, he pleaded guilty in federal court in New Jersey in a racketeering case that authorities said was a plot to extort $450,000 from a victim.
He received probation but was eventually jailed after twice violating that probation — including once for associating with known criminals, prosecutors said.
His next arrest came in 1994. That time he pleaded guilty to loansharking charges and was sentenced in 1998 to 30 months in prison.
He was released early from prison in 2000 at the age of 73 by the Federal Bureau of Prisons due, in part, to failing health caused by diabetes and heart disease.
"These guys know how to work the system," said Garcia, who worked his way into the inner circle of Gregory DePalma, another aging mobster who lightened his prison load due to poor health. "They're healthy as can be until it's time to appear in court. Then they look like death warmed over."
Five years later, Cilenti was charged in another major Genovese case, this time along with reputed one-time acting boss of the family Mathew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello.
Those charges stemmed from a plot to derail a federal probe into the family, including its alleged hooks into a school bus drivers' union.
Cilenti pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy and in 2007 received a sentence of probation that included electronic monitoring.
But just two hours after receiving the electronic ankle bracelet Nov. 15, 2007, in his Yonkers home, Cilenti was on the phone to his probation officer, complaining of pain and swelling in his legs.
A probation officer noted in court papers that Cilenti had stents in both legs and the bracelet was causing protrusions.
A federal judge ordered the ankle bracelet removed Dec. 17, 2007.
That same day Cilenti met with the construction industry executive he was extorting and discussed how he and another defendant, Peter Pace of Patterson, would arrange for trucking work for the victim if he paid them a kickback, prosecutors said.
Cilenti told the victim the job would go to him rather than a competitor, according to a partial transcript of a recording.
"I don't care, even if his prices are lower than yours. Understand?" Cilenti said, according to the transcript. "But we gotta know what we're doing."
Cilenti faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
But prison terms don't faze hard-core old-time mobsters, Garcia said.
"It's part of the life. Prison's like a spa to them," he said. "They're in it for life."

http://www.lohud.com/article/20110127/NEWS01/101270404/-1/newsfront/Feds--Age-didn-t-deter-mobster-suspect-Daniel-Cilenti--83

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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Feds say Vernace tied to mob weddings and wakes

  January 23, 2011    Dapper_Don

John GottiReputed Suffern mobster Bartolomeo Vernace was a regular at the Ravenite social club, "Dapper Don" John Gotti's notorious Gambino family headquarters in Queens.
And federal prosecutors say Vernace was so entrenched in the Mafia that he was seen at more than 20 mob weddings and wakes — including Gotti's own in 2002 — and ran his own string of Queens cafes.
Reputed to have a seat on the Gambino three-member ruling panel, the 61-year-old Vernace also had a share of Gotti's Teflon: He beat a double-murder charge in the 1981 deaths of two men gunned down at the Shamrock Bar in Queens.
Vernace is now charged with those killings again, this time in federal court as one of 127 defendants arrested this week in one of the most sweeping organized-crime roundups in FBI history.
Also charged with racketeering, conspiracy to murder, illegal gambling, extortion and illegal use of a firearm, Vernace was among seven defendants from the Lower Hudson Valley.
They include New Rochelle resident Neil Messina, charged with killing a man during a 1992 break-in robbery, and Yonkers resident Daniel Cilenti, a reputed Genovese family member who was released early from a labor-racketeering sentence in 1998 due to failing health.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called the arrests "an important and encouraging step forward in disrupting La Cosa Nostra's operations."
The sweep struck all of New York's major crime families, including the entire leadership of the Colombo family, netting Richard "Nerves" Fusco, a Yonkers resident alleged to be the reputed crime family's consigliere.
Fusco, 74, also has the distinction of being pictured in one of organized crime's most famous photos: a shot of Frank Sinatra, Carlo Gambino and several alleged mobsters in the 1970s at the now-defunct Westchester Premier Theater in Greenburgh
According to prosecutors, Vernace has been atop the Gambino family since 2008, serving on a ruling panel that took over when other mob bosses were jailed.
As early as 1989 he was at Gotti's Ravenite social club, and attended the funeral of Gotti's father in 1992. Last year, he was on the guest list for the wedding of a Gambino family captain's daughter.
In what prosecutors called "a measure of Vernace's stature," several reputed high-ranking mobsters attended his own sister's wake in 2006, including alleged acting underboss Domenico Cefalu and alleged Gambino consigliere Joseph Corrozzo.
"Vernace is one of the leaders of the Gambino crime family and he has been involved in acts of violence, including murder," federal prosecutors said in documents released this week.
"He thus falls within the 'small but identifiable group of particularly dangerous defendants as to whom neither the imposition of stringent release conditions nor the prospect of revocation of release can reasonably assure the safety of the community," prosecutors wrote.
Vernace, nicknamed "Pepe" and "Bobby Glasses," had been arrested by New York City police Nov. 22, 1998, and charged in the deaths of John D'Agnese and Richard Godkin at the Shamrock Bar on Jamaica Avenue. Records show that Vernace was released on bail in the case two months later, until he was tried in state court and acquitted in November 2002.
Prosecutors charge that while on bail Vernace ran illegal gambling and loansharking operations, including out of cafes he ran in Queens. The slayings are now among the federal charges unsealed Thursday in federal courts in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
More than 700 federal and local law enforcement personnel took part in the sweep.

http://www.lohud.com/article/20110122/NEWS01/101220340/-1/newsfront/Feds--Vernace-tied-to-mob-weddings--wakes

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Tales from the 2011 Mob Busts

  January 23, 2011    Dapper_Don

Mob Tale #1
He’s an octogenarian Genovese soldier who never got a promotion in 64 years, but Daniel “Uncle Danny” Cilenti (left) still strikes fear in the heart of the feds.
Prosecutors filed a motion to keep the 83-year-old mobster behind bars after last week’s sweep because he’s a “danger to the community and a risk of flight.”
Cilenti has been a member of the Genovese crime family since 1947. He’s a regular offender — convicted of possession of bookmaking records in 1961, 1963 and 1965.
After a 2007 guilty plea in an obstruction of justice case, he was sentenced to home confinement with an ankle monitor. But the wiseguy whined that the device was painful and the court allowed it be removed. The same day he took off the monitor, Cilenti allegedly met the government witness at this home to discuss a construction project kickback scheme.
Mob Tale #2
It’s mob shakedown 101.
Gambino family solider Joseph Lombardi was caught on tape offering a tutorial on what to say to those who don’t pay up. “I’m gonna shut you out and shut you down everywhere I can and I will,” Lombardi is heard on tape telling an unnamed construction worker he is trying to extort. “You says, you’re a piece of s- - t, and I will f - - k you back, don’t worry about that.”
Lombardi was trying to collect $30,000 from the hardhat, according to government documents. Lombardi, in another taped conservation, asks the worker who said he didn’t have to meet with him in person. “You’re gonna have to tell me who, ’cause I’m gonna have to, maybe . . . physically go see him,” Lombardi threatens.
Mob Tale #3
Joseph “Jo Jo” Corozzo (right), who was arrested this week as alleged consigliere for the Gambinos, once sent two wiseguys to visit a wounded man in the hospital with an offer the patient couldn’t refuse.
The man was shot in the groin during a road rage incident in 1983 involving Corozzo’s Mercedes-Benz. The victim tried to argue with Corozzo’s son, who was driving the car that night in Brooklyn, and was shot by Corozzo’s passenger, Andrew DiDonato. Corozzo told his goons to offer the victim $10,000. He could take the cash and live. If he cooperated with cops, “he wouldn’t leave the hospital alive.”
He took the money, DiDonato recounts in his new book, with biographer Dennis Griffin: “Surviving the Mob: A Street Soldier’s Life inside the Gambino Crime Family.”
Mob Tale #4
It’s not uncommon to hate your mother-in-law, but Peter Pace Jr. took that fury to a whole new level.
The Genovese family associate boasted to a government witness during a January 2008 recorded conversation that he tried to throw the woman — whom he described as a junkie — off a roof two decades earlier.
“So I brought her up to the f- - -ing roof about six stories . . . I hung her off the f- - - ing side of the roof,” he said, according to government documents.
Apparently she decided not to nag him anymore. Or at least Pace, 49, of suburban Patterson, NY, had a change of heart — letting her live.
But Pace did claim to informants to have shot someone and to have taken several bullets himself. A witness said he had seen Pace grab a baseball bat from his car after it was vandalized on Arthur Avenue in The Bronx and storm off in search of the vandals, according to a government memo seeking to keep Pace in jail after last week’s arrest. He was charged with racketeering conspiracy, including extortion, and faces up to 20 years in prison on each of the five counts.
Mob Tale #5
Richard “Dickie” Dehmer always gets the upper hand on his debtors.
While discussing with a deadbeat who owed gambling money, the Genovese enforcer from Springfield, NJ, was taped saying, “I guarantee you, he needs his hands to work. He ain’t working no more for a while.”
Dehmer, 75, is respected because of his ties to Genovese solider and waterfront boss Stephen “Beach” Depiro, according to prosecutors. “People paid Dehmer because they feared Depiro,” according to a government memo.
Photo of Nicholas Corozzo, who was a wanted fu...Nick CorozzoDehmer, who is also accused of running an illegal gambling den in Kenilworth, NJ, employed bread-and-butter intimidation tactics, telling one debtor he would use a bat and “break every bone” to collect his cash.
Dehmer faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the charges against him.
Mob Tale #6
Being married to the mob had its perks and downsides. Vinnie “Marbles” Dragonetti’s wedding to Bernadette Corozzo, the daughter of acting Gambino boss Nicholas “Little Nick” Corozzo, was a boon for business and got him great gifts — but he ended up shackled to the life with a pair of golden handcuffs.
Dragonetti, who took over his father’s landscaping business, “got the boost he needed” from his mob family, including a lawn-care route in John Gotti’s Howard Beach neighborhood. As a birthday gift, Nick Corozzo transferred a loan-shark customer who owed him $60,000 to Dragonetti.
But it also brought the attention of the authorities. Dragonetti’s bust last week could send him to the slammer for the third time.

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