A brush with the law: Mobster turns to painting while in jail for haunted mansion murder
Maggio began painting while serving time in the witness protection section of the prison.
Some of the mob rat's paintings are displayed in a prison waiting room.
A Bonanno turncoat who traded in his brass knuckles for a paint brush and palette was sentenced yesterday to time served for the murder of a mob associate inside a supposedly haunted mansion in Staten Island.
Michael Maggio has served nearly six years in prison for the gangland killing of Robert McKelvey, who was strangled, dismembered and incinerated at the spooky Kreischer Mansion.
While Maggio was providing information to the FBI to dismantle the crew of Bonanno soldier Gino Galestro, he began painting landscapes and portraits in the witness protection section of prison.
Defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo said the paintings are displayed in the waiting room of the prison, and he provided copies of the artwork for Judge Allyne Ross to review in Brooklyn Federal Court.
"I thought, more eloquently than anything I could say, the paintings show there's good in him," Agnifilo said. "A gentleness, a humility more than I could say."
Agnifilo said Maggio sends paintings to his young children regularly, but he has been cut off from contact with them because their mother is Galestro's sister-in-law.
"Do they get the painting or is it thrown in the garbage?" Agnifilo said, adding that Maggio has no way of knowing.
Even Maggio's father - who stabbed his wife to death when the defendant was a boy - refused to even write a letter to the judge because a cousin, Staten Island restaurateur Frank Fresca, was believed to have been rubbed out because Maggio is a rat.
Maggio testified at the trial of Bonanno associate Joseph Young, who carried out McKelvey's killing. A crew of young wanna-bes who chopped up the victim's body and fed the pieces into an old incinerator at the mansion also pleaded guilty.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Dennehy acknowledged Maggio's assistance in what was essentially a missing person case until he stepped forward.
Maggio wept as he told the judge: "I'm sorry for the life I was living. I'm sorry for everything."
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