October 18, 2018
This Week in Gang Land
This Week's guest column is by Anthony DiPietro. He is an up and
coming attorney who opted for big league criminal defense work as soon
as he passed the bar exam several years ago after graduating magna
cum laude from Pace Law School. DiPietro has a knack for finding
evidence that the government withheld from defendants in organized crime
cases, and was Gang Land's 2016 Rookie Of The Year.
He has already worked on two successful exonerations of wrongfully
convicted inmates, and is admitted to argue cases before the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Along with veteran attorney Mathew Mari, DiPietro also represents defendants previously convicted of being high-level organized crime figures in federal court, including Colombo family boss Carmine (Junior) Persico, acting Bonanno family boss Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano and Gambino associate Edmund Boyle. In these types of cases, DiPietro argues, the rule of law and equal justice have failed the most, with the full support of a complicit U.S. government.
Carmine Persico Was Framed For Murder In Historic Commission Case
There is truly nothing historic about the "Commission Case,"
except that it marks the real beginning of injustices perpetrated by the
Department of Justice in Italian-American organized crime cases.
Although Carmine Persico was convicted of nonviolent bid rigging and
labor bribery offenses, he received 100 years of imprisonment based on
false murder accusations presented by prosecutors at sentencing. Despite
many misconceptions, Persico has never been charged with committing a
single murder. To date, he has served almost 50 years in prison for
nonviolent offenses, and at age 85, his projected release date remains
2050.
More than three decades ago, prosecutors requested that the Manhattan Federal Court Judge Richard Owen impose a sentence that Persico would “not be physically capable of completing.” They claimed that Persico deserved a life sentence based on their belief that he had participated in several uncharged murders. There was no hearing to address the prosecution's accusations, no witnesses identified by the prosecution to support these claims, nor any discovery provided to his lawyers so that they could investigate and rebut those allegations.
Instead, Judge Owen summarily accepted the prosecution's hearsay proffers that Persico was a murderer, and it sentenced him to 100 years in prison. The judge did not even bother to ask Persico if he had any objections to the uncharged allegations until after his sentence was imposed.
The Government Broke Everything Except Vincent Basciano
The government's prosecution of Vincent J. Basciano is instructive
for all the wrong reasons. It exemplifies the win-at-all-cost attitude
of FBI agents and federal prosecutors against alleged members of
organized crime and the uneven playing field that the accused face in
such proceedings. For Vincent Basciano, there was no monetary cost,
presiding judge, law, or ethical standard that would deter certain rogue
federal officials from trying every scheme possible to break him – to
coerce Basciano into giving up and capitulating. And when that failed,
to destroy any legitimate chance he had for a successful defense.
Triple Jeopardy: Feds Manipulate Law To Wrongly Imprison Edmund Boyle For Decades
Edmund Boyle has been railroaded by the FBI into serving decades in
federal prison for the same nonviolent bank burglaries for which he
served time in state in the 1990s. The targeting of Boyle is of no
surprise, even in light of his Irish descent. To the feds, Eddie Boyle
was guilty of being friends with Italian American on their radar, and
therefore, he too has limited rights in federal court. The fact is Boyle
was classified an "organized" criminal by the system because of the
neighborhood he grew up in, the friendships he held, the wakes and
funerals he attended, and the monotonous communications he had with his
lifelong friends and their families.
Read this week's column
Unless you get really lucky, and find a copy squirreled away in the
wrong section of your local bookstore, you won't be able to get a
first printing of Mob Boss: The Life Of Little Al
D'Arco, The Man Who Brought Down The Mafia. But there
are still some second print versions of the hardcover available
as gifts or for your own reading pleasure.
Because of the heavy demand, Thomas Dunne Books went to the well again for a second printing of Mob Boss, the book that The New York Times called a "gripping, novelistic biography – a bulls-eye."
The mass market, paperback version was published in 2015. It is available online and at your favorite bookstores for about eight bucks. You still should be able to pick up a copy of the hard cover at your favorite bookstore, or, as Claude Raines might say to Humphrey Bogart, from any number of the usual online suspects: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and BooksAMillion, as well as an independent book seller near you.
See why Mob Boss has been praised by Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Nicholas Pileggi, Mister District Attorney Robert Morgenthau – as well as readers everywhere.
Mob Boss is also available in a special BIG PRINT edition. And for those who would rather hear every word of the 406 page book read to them, Mob Boss is also available on an MP3 CD from Tantor Audio.
