Insult to Fatal Injury: Whacked Wiseguy Ends in Potter’s Field

Like ancient Indian burial grounds in a horror movie, mob graveyards have popped up all over town lately. Since 2004, law enforcement agents digging in backyards, vacant lots, and garages on Staten Island and in Queens and Brooklyn have unearthed the remains of a New York Post executive, two Bonanno capos, and the first murder victim of Mafia Cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa.Now, the FBI has added a more unlikely location to the list: Potter’s Field.Gang Land has learned that a team of FBI agents determined last month that a Bonanno family associate who disappeared 10 years ago, Richard Guiga, 41, was laid to rest there.Sources say Guiga received a pauper’s funeral and was buried in the city’s Potter’s Field on Hart Island — a small, rocky strip that rises above Long Island Sound and is officially part of the Bronx—which has been the final resting place for unclaimed bodies and New York’s indigent since the city purchased the island for $75,000 in 1868.For many years, Guiga, whom the Luchese family had marked for death in a dispute that began in 1991 over a woman he was trying to hold onto while in prison, was assumed to have been whacked by mob rivals when his mother, Rosanna, reported him missing in September 1997.Last week, during a brief account of Guiga’s demise in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, turncoat Bonanno mobster Nicholas “P.J.” Pisciotti testified that he and a cohort killed Guiga during a knife fight outside a Lower East Side bar and disposed of his body at an undisclosed location on Staten Island.Comparison-DNA analyses have not yet been completed, but authorities believe the tests will confirm that Guiga was one of the roughly 1,500 persons buried each year in Potter’s Field by Riker’s Island inmates, who earn 35 cents an hour for their work at the official City Cemetery.Sources say FBI agents were skeptical when P.J. took them to a wooded area where he said that he — and a cohort who was also involved in the knife fight, Michael DeMaria — had buried Guiga yet found no signs of his remains.But Pisciotti held fast, and a follow-up inquiry disclosed an unidentified body had been discovered at that location and was interred on Hart Island after the Medical Examiner’s Office took DNA samples for possible later identification.About six weeks ago, sources say, those samples, as well as DNA samples donated by Rosanna Guiga, were sent to an FBI lab to determine whether the remains originally found in a wooded area of Staten Island in 1997 should be exhumed for re-burial by his mother.THE 31-CONTRACT MANActually Guiga was lucky to live as long as he did. In the early 1990s, no less than 31 Luchese mobsters and associates — including family boss Vittorio “Vic” Amuso, underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, and onetime acting boss Alphonse “Little Al” D’Arco — were involved in plots to whack him, according to FBI documents obtained by Gang Land.Guiga’s troubles with the Lucheses began when he tried to maintain a relationship from prison with a former comare (“girlfriend” in mob parlance) who dumped him for Luchese capo George “Georgie Neck” Zappola, according to a report by FBI agents Stephen Byrne and Kevin Hallinan. Guiga’s problems escalated when he refused to heed Luchese family warnings to leave the woman alone, and sent a pal to check on her while Zappola was at her home, the agents wrote.“He was a violent, vicious coke user, the most obnoxious scum who ever walked the streets,” recalled one knowledgeable Gang Land source, insisting that he would not let his personal animus for Guiga taint his remarks. “He was universally hated. His father disowned him. He was truly a guy that only a mother could love. When he disappeared, and word got out that he was gone, everyone but her was a suspect.”In one FBI report, Messrs. Byrne and Hallinan listed a dozen efforts to kill Guiga by 18 participants that were initiated between 1991 and the end of 1993 but aborted for one reason or another. One attempt, which included the use of a silencer-equipped machine gun, was prevented by the arrest of two wiseguys as they got into a stolen car meant to be used in the planned hit.Guiga escaped a plot to whack him during a drug deal, one to poison him, and yet another one to kill him as he visited a friend at Beekman Hospital. He also ducked a scheme to murder him in the basement of Ray’s Pizza, the landmark Prince Street eatery owned by Luchese mobster Ralph “Raffie” Cuomo.A DAUGHTER’S PLEA LIGHTENS THE WEIGHTIn a remarkable turnabout, Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan on Monday gave former acting Genovese family boss Liborio “Barney” Bellomo a year and a day in prison for a 12-year-old fraud in a racketeering case that began with Bellomo facing the death penalty for a 1998 murder.The surprisingly sweet sentence by Judge Kaplan, who last month was ready to reject a lenient plea deal that called for Bellomo to receive 41 months in satisfaction of all the charges in his indictment, was promptly called a “miracle” by Bellomo’s mother-in-law, who joined his four children and other family members at the proceeding.It’s more likely that other, less heavenly factors were at the core of the compassionate sentence by the usually tough-on-wiseguys judge.Judge Kaplan may well have been motivated by defense lawyer Barry Levin’s fact-filled court papers, which make the case that Barney was probably innocent of the main charge being tried, and by the government’s admissions that whatever case it had against Bellomo had fallen apart.And the judge was unquestionably moved by the emotional, heart-wrenching plea for leniency by Bellomo’s 27-year-old daughter, Sabrina, a lawyer whose only work since passing the state bar two years ago has been on her father’s case.After the young lawyer detailed the incredible sense of loss that she and her brothers had endured since her father was first jailed in 1996, Judge Kaplan pointedly told the gangster that his daughter had risen above the many mistakes he made during his crime-filled life. “You certainly have someone to be proud of in the person sitting next to you,” the judge said.THE LION’S NEPHEW SLEEPS TONIGHT — IN JAILOne day after Judge Kaplan squashed the government’s efforts to slam Bellomo, the FBI upped the ante for the current acting Genovese boss, Daniel “The Lion” Leo, who is imprisoned as he awaits trial for racketeering and extortion: They arrested Leo’s nephew and reputed right-hand-man-in-crime for extortion.A federal prosecutor disclosed that the FBI has a year’s worth of tape-recorded talks between the nephew, Joseph “Joey” Leo, 45, and The Lion that will likely lead to more charges for both men.An assistant U.S. attorney, Eric Snyder, said the FBI bugged a car — a black 2006 Lincoln Zephyr — that Joey used to chauffeur his uncle to meetings with other wiseguys. Like his uncle, Mr. Snyder argued successfully at a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger in Manhattan, Joey Leo was a danger to the community and should be denied bail. Snippets of the conversations disclosed in an affidavit by FBI agent Michael Castner show that Danny and Joey Leo used interesting — but nonetheless easily decipherable — codes in their efforts to thwart the FBI’s electronic surveillance that they suspected was in place.On March 19, 2006, according to the affidavit, Joey informed his uncle that a colleague “told me he’s got no kids at his house,” meaning, Mr. Castner wrote, that no FBI agents were conducting surveillance at the cohort’s house. Earlier in the discussion, Joey told The Lion he had been unable to pick up an overdue loan shark payment from the owner of a private car service by stating: “I was supposed to buy some firewood today and it’s been called off.”Mr. Snyder also revealed some heated, uncoded words between Joey Leo and his girlfriend that seemed to carry weight with Judge Dolinger’s bail denial:“She tells Joey Leo, ‘You have no respect for people. You are a murderer. You told me you murdered someone.'”This column and other news of organized crime will be available today at ganglandnews.com.

Insult to Fatal Injury: Whacked Wiseguy Ends in Potter’s Field

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