WING YEUNG STILL SCHEMING

By Jerry Capeci

During the decade or so that Wing Yeung Chan was running the rackets in New York City's Chinatown, his younger brother Wing Lok was out front doing the dirty work for their notorious Ghost Shadows gang.

Wing Yeung, 51, was a powerful and respected businessman and president of the On Leong Tong, a national association of Chinese merchants. Wing Lok, 35, meanwhile, was the "street boss" of the Ghost Shadows and handled the business of murder.

As disclosed in the New York Daily News yesterday, Wing Yeung, last year began cooperating with the feds on the eve of his racketeering and murder trial. His most important contribution was convincing Wing Lok to return from a safe haven in China and team up with the federal government.

Now that both brothers are in business with the feds, Wing Lok is still out front doing the dirty work while Wing Yeung remains in the shadows wheeling and dealing. Wing Lok is slated to be the key witness at the upcoming federal murder trial of two men the Chans say they hired to kill a Chinatown businessman who was set to testify against them in 1991.

Wing Yeung is sitting this one out. After convincing his brother to cooperate, Wing Yeung quickly fell out of favor, sources said.

From jail, he telephoned his co-defendants, who had been charged with stealing millions from immigrants in a phony investment scheme and absolved them of wrongdoing in tape recorded conversations. "In essence, he told them, 'I know we didn't do anything wrong, but when the FBI charges you with a crime, you have to plead guilty to save face. That's what I did,' " a source close to the case explained.

Because of those discussions, which began in October, 1995, and ended in March, federal prosecutors dismissed the massive fraud charges and decided that Wing Yeung was useless as a prosecution witness.

The crafty gangster may have lost his usefulness to the feds, Chinatown sources say he still wields considerable influence in the Chinese community. They say Wing Yeung was instrumental in Keung Lee winning election last month as president of the On Leong Tong.

Louie Ha Ha isn't laughing too much these days.

Ha Ha, a reputed Bonanno capo whose given name is Louis Attanasio, copped to federal loansharking charges that will likely cost him a couple of years in prison when he gets sentenced next month.

Ha Ha, 52, along with crew members Ernest (Chubby) Casazza, 67, and Edward Barbaro, 39, pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Federal Court to collecting a total of $2500 from a loanshark victim early this year.

Attanasio, a capo since 1984, admitted the relatively minor charge of collecting $500 from the victim. He had originally been charged with more serious loansharking charges dating back to 1989. But those were dropped in return for his pleading guilty to the one charge.

As predicted in this space last week, Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan denied bail for reputed Genovese crime family acting boss Liborio (Barney) Bellomo. Bellomo, who is awaiting trial on racketeering and murder charges, claims he had nothing to do with a 1991 gangland style slaying and took three lie detector tests to convince Kaplan he was a good bail risk. An inmate informer told the feds Bellomo ingested lithium, a psychoactive drug prescribed for manic-depressives, to beat the polygraph.

In a mindboggling decision, Kaplan ruled that Bellomo "probably took lithium, albeit took it in insufficient quantities to show up in the government's test, in a devious effort to deceive both the examiners and the Court."

Since when does a federal judge decide something PROBABLY happened when the only evidence before him refutes it. And how could amounts of lithium that were so small they could not be detected in sophisticated FBI tests have affected the polygraph test results? And what about Bellomo's offer to take a lie detector test administered by an FBI polygraph expert and provide blood, urine and hair samples before the test?