Former strip club owner who ratted out Gambino family refuses witness protection
A former strip club kingpin who went from doing business with the mob to helping convict dozens of gangsters, including John “Junior” Gotti, has been hiding in plain sight in the Big Apple since getting sprung from prison, The Post has learned.
Despite being warned there’s a $1 million bounty on his head, Scores co-founder Michael Blutrich refused to enter the witness protection program, instead bouncing around from Westchester to Long Island and the city since his release.
The disbarred lawyer, 68, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the $400 million scam that led to the 1994 collapse of the National Heritage Life Insurance Co., but the punishment was cut by a third due to his cooperation with the feds.
Blutrich, who no longer has an association with Scores, said he refused to enter witness protection after his 2013 release from prison because “they would have sent me to South Dakota or Utah.”
“I would have been the only Jew in the state. I had just done 13 years alone. I wasn’t going in for more,” he said.
Now, instead of a closet full of custom Brioni suits and a brand-new Mercedes, he wears black jeans and sport shirts and drives a “s- -t brown” Toyota.
“My life is a scheme of insanity. With the government’s permission, I file taxes in one address of a family member’s. I pick up my mail, all my mail, all my credit cards, everything I put together myself, is all at the New York City address,” he said.
“I have to remember what’s where all the time.”
Over dinner at Sparks Steak House, where mob boss Paul Castellano was gunned down under orders from “Dapper Don” John Gotti in 1985, Blutrich discussed his life in the shadows and his time as an FBI informant — including the night Leonardo DiCaprio unwittingly saved his life.
The incident took place in 1997, Blutrich said, on a night when he was supposed to meet with acting Colombo boss Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico at Scores to discuss expanding the strip club into Brooklyn.
But DiCaprio unexpectedly showed up with fellow actor Tobey Maguire and magician David Blaine, so Blutrich escorted them to the Crow’s Nest, a private second-floor room.
The A-listers wanted Blutrich to join them for dinner, but he was worried about the “F-Bird” — an FBI digital recording device — that was taped to his inner thigh.
“I don’t want to get involved where I record someone famous saying something stupid,” Blutrich said.
But Persico was hours late, Blutrich said, so he sneaked outside to the FBI van and agents took back the recorder and left.
“Ten minutes later, Allie Boy showed up,” he recalled.
“Fifteen minutes later, I’m standing in the hallway, naked,” he said, describing how a mobster searched him while another brandishing a handgun watched.
“If I had that F-Bird on me, I’m dead,” Blutrich recalled.
Blutrich said his scariest moment came when he was confronted by Lucchese crime family capo Angelo “Cheesecake” Urgitano, who “spilled water all over me to see if I was wearing a wire.”
He also recalled a dinner at the since-shuttered Chin Chin Chinese restaurant in Midtown with Gambino gangster Craig DePalma, who later committed suicide after turning rat.
“He said he had heard that one of his guys in Scores had said something nasty about him. I said, ‘I don’t want to lie to you, but I heard the same thing,’ ” Blutrich recalled.
“He got up and picked up the table and flipped it over.”
Blutrich wrote a memoir titled “Scores” that was published last year, and he’s hoping to have it turned into a TV series.
Asked how he copes with the constant threat of mob retribution, Blutrich reasoned: “It’s all a state of mind. You can’t keep up the fear. I don’t let it take over.”
https://nypost.com/2018/03/05/strip-club-owner-who-ratted-out-mobsters-wont-go-into-hiding/
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