Tales from the 2011 Mob Busts
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.
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.
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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