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News and Features about Organized Crime, Mafia and La Cosa Nostra taken from National and Local News Sources. In an attempt to get you this type of coverage in a timely manner we can not be responsible for the content of the following material. |
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9-23-99 Mobster helps prosecutors in trial of alleged cop killer. 9-23-99 NEW YORK (AP) - Prosecutors in the Brooklyn trial of a man accused in the savage slaying of an off-duty police officer more than 20 years ago relied on a tough-talking turncoat mobster Thursday to help make their case. The key witness, Frank Gioia Jr., testified that defendant Tony Francesehi boasted about killing the officer while trying to convince Gioia to include him on a hit team. Gioia, then a soldier in the Luchese crime family, was plotting to avenge the suspicious construction-site death of his girlfriend's father, also Francesehi's brother-in-law. "I want to get even for him," the burly Gioia, 32, quoted Francesehi as saying to him in 1992. "I've done some work. ... You know, years ago, me and (a cousin), we killed a cop." Gioia explained to jurors that he had no interest in using someone he considered no more than a wannabe gangster. "I had my own crew," he said. "I didn't really need him." Francesehi, 44, a truck driver from Jackson, N.J. whose real name is Manuel Gonzales, pleaded innocent last year to charges he killed Officer Ronald Stapleton while waiting to pull a holdup in a parking lot outside a Sheepshead Bay bar on Dec. 18, 1977. The defendant and his cousin, who has since died, allegedly jumped the officer, gouged his eye out with a meat hook and then shot him with his own gun. Stapleton, a 32-year-old father of two, remained hospitalized for several weeks before dying on Jan. 3, 1978. The murder investigation went cold - until Gioia cut a deal with federal authorities. On the stand Thursday, the Little Italy native detailed an organized crime career that included contract killings, shootings and arson. He claimed that after he was arrested for trafficking heroin in 1994, the Luchese family abandoned him and began harassing his family. Gioia said he retaliated - and avoided a 30-year prison term - by agreeing to tell authorities everything about his crimes and those of others. Now out of prison and under federal protection, the witness estimated that he has provided information against more than 80 gangsters and other criminal suspects. During one of his many debriefings, Gioia tipped off investigators that Francesehi was a probable suspect in the Stapleton slaying by describing their 1992 conversation. The hit they talked about never happened. In his opening statement, defense attorney Sanford Talkis suggested that any testimony by cooperating mobster should be viewed as self-serving and unreliable. He also told the jury that the prosecution had no physical evidence or eye witnesses. "The reason they don't? He didn't do it," Talkis said. AP-ES-09-23-99 1630EDT< Copyright © Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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