Bonanno Mobster's Honeymoon Cut Short By Federal Indictment; Heads To Jail Despite Wife's Plea
December 01, 2010 Dapper_Don
One of the big drawbacks of being married to the mob is that sometimes the feds trample on your wedded bliss.
Just ask the blushing bride of Vito Pipitone, a Bonanno crime family associate who today was denied his third attempt at a honeymoon.
The saga began last fall, when Pipitone and his new wife, Paula, stepped off a jet as newlyweds in Hawaii, hoping to spend the first week of their marriage surrounded by the splendor of tropical paradise. But federal prosecutors had other plans.
"Vito and I were married on October 4, 2009 ... the happiest day of our lives," Paula Pipitone wrote a federal judge. "Two days later our world was shattered and I was hoping to wake and be told it was all a bad dream.
Vito Pipitone
But it was real enough: a phone call to Pipitone in Hawaii informed him that the FBI was planning to arrest him there on mob-related assault charges filed in New York unless he turned himself in to authorities in Honolulu.
The newly married couple canceled their honeymoon and boarded a jet to fly home.
Back in New York, Pipitone eventually pleaded guilty to assault charges for his involvement in the stabbing of two teens in 2004.
Both teenagers "almost died" in the attack, prosecutor Stephen Franks said at a sentencing hearing yesterday in Brooklyn federal court. The mob crew suspected them of vandalizing the restaurant of a man with connections to a Bonanno crime family soldier, Paul Spina.
However, the Bonanno group attacked the wrong teens, incorrectly thinking they were responsible for breaking the window of the Napa & Sonoma steakhouse in Whitestone, Queens, following a dispute over a debt, court records show.
Last month, Vito and Paula Pipitone tried unsuccessfully to finally take their honeymoon. Vito, who has been under house arrest as a condition of his bail, had his attorney write the judge to request that he and his wife be allowed to spend a weekend at the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City to celebrate their first anniversary of marriage.
"He and his wife have yet to have any type of honeymoon," the attorney, Joseph Mure, Jr., wrote of the 29-year-old nightclub DJ and sometime union laborer and his wife.
The request was denied.
Today, Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced Pipitone to 4 1/2 years in prison for playing "a central role" in the stabbing attack, saying that the young mobster had shown no remorse for the crime.
When his defense attorney today again asked Garaufis to modify Pipitone’s house arrest rules so that he might at last take a honeymoon before surrendering at a federal prison, the judge again denied the request.
In her Nov. 19 letter to the judge, Paula Pipitone bemoaned such drawbacks and shed light on the occasionally unglamorous reality of a mob relationship.
"I look forward to the day Vito and I can live life as a married couple and start a family," Paula Pipitione wrote. "I would love for nothing more than to have a normal marriage that most take for granted."
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/mob_honeymoon_put_off_by_judge_again_eyGbFDHhda9swmDgRKK0rO#ixzz16pncLJcl
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