Son of Gambino Captain sentenced to two months in prison for MTA overtime fraud
The son of a notorious Queens mobster was sentenced to prison time Wednesday for his part in a scheme to bilk the MTA out of thousands of dollars in bogus overtime he collected while purporting to be at work.
Frank Pizzonia, son of reputed Gambino captain Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia, was sentenced to two months in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in the scheme.
“I apologize to everyone and regret my actions,” Pizzonia told Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan federal court before he was sentenced.
Pizzonia, 54, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in January, raked in enormous amounts of cash from the state agency in 2018, earning a total salary of $305,000, including $223,000 in overtime wages.
Despite the eye-popping amount of overtime income Pizzonia claimed that year, federal prosecutors only charged him with wrongfully claiming 150 hours of overtime, according to court records.
The “highly conservative” amount of hours were the ones when prosecutors said they could prove — using cell site data — that Pizzonia was not at work when he logged hours on the job.
Pizzonia, who was hired by the MTA in 1988 and worked as a track worker for the LIRR, schemed with “overtime king” Thomas Caputo and three others “by repeatedly covering for one another’s absences from work,” according to the indictment against them. He is the fourth to be sentenced.
Engelmayer chided Pizzonia at the sentencing hearing for his crime, which he said warranted a prison term because it was both one of public corruption and of a conspiracy with fellow MTA workers.
“You were stealing money the public expected would be spent in the public interest,” Engelmayer said, noting the hard-working taxpayers of New York state were indirect victims in the case.
Pizzonia’s lawyer, Joseph Corrozo, argued at the hearing that his client is a hard-working family man whose life was upended when he was arrested for the scheme.
“He’s all about work and his family,” Corrozo told Engelmayer. “He values hard work.”
The elder Pizzonia served a 15-year prison sentence for plotting the murders of a “Bonnie-and-Clyde” couple he suspected of robbing his Queens social club.
“Skinny Dom,” who was acquitted of actually carrying out the pair’s 1992 murder, was released from prison in 2019.
After his son’s arrest last year, he answered the door at their Queens home and told a Post reporter to “Fuhgeddaboudit!”
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