At Least Uncle Sam Likes ‘Joey’ Gambina
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

There’s not much to like about 36-year-old wannabe wiseguy Guiseppe “Joey” Gambina.
The record shows that he’s an arsonist and a cocaine abuser who once pummeled his father in a not so friendly family dispute. He’s been involved in at least one successful murder plot, and he also seems to relish the idea of inflicting pain on others.
When he and six cohorts kidnapped and assaulted two men in a social club in an effort to pry information from them, “everyone present took part in the beating, but Gambina was particularly active and was poking the victims with a knife,” an FBI report about the kidnapping says.
Gambina’s mob sponsor, acting boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, is also unhappy with him, for a different reason. Gambina “dogged it” during a mob rubout last year, causing Basciano to remove him from a list of associates primed for induction into the Bonanno family, the jailed acting boss is overheard saying on an FBI tape recording.
There is someone who likes Joey Gambina – his Uncle Sam.
Gambina, who was arrested this spring for violating his supervised release conditions after serving three years on the arson rap, has followed the lead of Mafia boss Joseph Massino and agreed to testify against his one-time mentor Basciano, sources told Gang Land.
A decade ago, Gambina ran with the Giannini Crew, a violent gang of Ridgewood, Queens-based young hoodlums – many of them relatives of mobsters of three crime families. In recent years, he’s been a member of Basciano’s Bronx-based mob squad.
Gambina’s shortcomings as a wiseguy, and a son, came up numerous times earlier this year during two tape-recorded conversations between Vinny Gorgeous and Massino – the only New York Godfather to turn on the mob and wear a wire for the feds.
Basciano soft-peddled Gambina’s assault on his father as old news that took place 10 or 15 years ago, but Massino said that three years ago, shortly before he was jailed, he learned from Gambina’s father that Joey was looking to do it again over a dispute about “parking a car in the parking lot.”
“He was stoned on something … he wanted to beat up his father,” Massino said.
Lovable or not, Gambina has al ready paid dividends for the feds, sources said.
Last week, three former cohorts – Vincenzo Masi, Frank “Fat Frank” Esposito, and Eugene “Gene” Gallo – were hit with racketeering charges that include loan-sharking, gambling, and assault. Esposito, 50, and Gallo, 34, were released on bail. Masi, who allegedly used a hammer to fracture the skull of a deadbeat gambler, was detained to await trial.
Gambina’s main value to the feds, however, will be as a witness against Basciano.
No one in the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office will say it publicly, but where Basciano is concerned, it seems to be personal. The reason is spelled out in a racketeering indictment lodged against him this year: He allegedly plotted to kill one of their own, prosecutor Greg Andres.
Sources say Gambina has no evidence about that scheme, but has plenty to say about a murder charge in the same indictment, a conspiracy to kill Randolph Pizzolo, an associate who was shot to death in Brooklyn on December 1, two weeks after Basciano was indicted and jailed on unrelated racketeering charges. Vinny Gorgeous, capo Dominick Cicale, and soldier Anthony “Ace” Aiello are all charged with the Pizzolo slaying. Aiello, a cousin of Joey’s, is also a Giannini Crew graduate.
Authorities declined to disclose any specifics Gambina has given the feds. Sources say he was involved in the planning but did not take part in the murder. That’s borne out by transcripts of taped conversations between the acting boss and his inquisitive, wired-up boss that took place a month after Pizzolo’s murder.
“I want to know who you used,” Massino said, acknowledging that wiseguys “ain’t supposed to talk about these things” but saying it was necessary in this case because Basciano had previously said Gambina, a known drug user with a “loose mouth,” was involved.
“I’m thinking it was Dominick and Ace,” Vinny Gorgeous said, adding that he had told them to use Gambina as well, but “word came back into me, he didn’t handle himself the right way.”
In an earlier conversation that wasn’t taped, Basciano told Massino that Gambina was involved. Later, with the tape running, he was asked why he’d told a different story. An exasperated Basciano responded: “‘Cause that’s how I set it up.” He added, “From what I’m gathering, he dogged it somehow or other.”
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Before Vinny Gorgeous gets down to dealing with the allegations that he plotted to kill a prosecutor, he has a courtroom date he can’t break.
In that case, Basciano is charged with one murder, two attempted murders, arson, and gambling. Slated for trial in January, the key witness against him will be Massino, who wasted no time in becoming a turncoat after he was convicted of seven murders on July 30, 2004, according to court papers recently filed in the case.
Within minutes after leaving the courtroom, Massino contacted the government. The following Monday, Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis assigned a “shadow counsel” to represent him, and the Last Don was on his way to becoming the first New York boss to cooperate.
“Massino had a fallback plan all along,” Basciano’s lawyer, Barry Levin, said. “He has now made it popular for all these miscreants to have a fallback position if things don’t go their way. The result: The government has assembled the largest collection of garbage ever seen in the criminal justice system to testify against my client.”
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Two weeks ago, the Department of Justice honored three prosecutors, a paralegal, and four FBI agents for “exceptional” work in investigating and convicting Massino and 34 other Bonanno mobsters and associates in cases that began years ago.
Because of a questionable policy that restricts awards only to current employees, a former assistant U.S. attorney, Ruth Nordenbrook, a vital cog in the monumental undertaking who retired early this year after 27 years as a federal prosecutor, did not even get an honorable mention for her “exceptional” work in the case.
Ms. Nordenbrook, a quiet but effective prosecutor when it came to taking down bad guys, supervised the FBI’s “forensic accounting” of Massino’s assets that led to his indictment. She was also instrumental in getting capo James “Big Louie” Tartaglione to flip and tape-recorded sessions with many top wiseguys, including Basciano.
The ex-prosecutor was not entirely overlooked, however. She was contacted by the producers of “Gangland Graveyard: Secrets of the Dead,” an hour-long documentary that airs on PBS on November 16 at 8 p.m. (channel 13 in New York). Ms. Nordenbrook helps take viewers from the beginning of the case to the mob burial ground on the Brooklyn-Queens border where the FBI last year dug up the remains of two capos Massino killed in 1980 on his way to the top of the crime family.
This column and other news of organized crime will appear later today at www.ganglandnews.com.