DA: Patz killer’s guilt rock-solid
HE’S NO Teflon Grandson.
Late Gambino boss John Gotti’s namesake relative — barely two weeks after getting sentenced to eight years on drug charges — was busted again Wednesday with recently acquitted Lufthansa heist suspect Vincent Asaro.
In a case of “Goodfellas” meets “Mob Star,” the 23-year-old mob scion and the 82-year-old Bonanno capo were accused in the road rage torching of a Queens man’s car, authorities said.
The fiery payback was arranged on April 4, 2012, after the driver cut Asaro off at a red light in Howard Beach.
Gotti was also indicted with two other Bonanno family associates in an April 18, 2012, Queens bank robbery that netted $5,491, authorities said.
Gotti’s girlfriend worked as a teller at the bank, had access to the security protocols and knew the amount of cash on hand, according to federal prosecutors.
“We were totally blindsided,” said his lawyer, Gerard Marrone. “His spirits are strong. He’s confident.”
Asaro, acquitted 16 months earlier in the city’s last big mob trial, was arrested and held without bail Wednesday. The $6 million Kennedy Airport robbery in 1978 was a focus of the hit Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas.”
“We’ve been down this road before with unfounded allegations,” said Asaro’s attorney Elizabeth Macedonio. “He’s frustrated, he’s anxious to have this matter resolved.”
Gotti, who initially believed he was headed to another correctional facility in Fishkill, instead arrived in Brooklyn Federal Court wearing a tan prison jumpsuit and white Puma sneakers.
Marrone said he and young Gotti both first learned about the new charges in a Daily News web story.
Gotti and Asaro, along with five other alleged Bonanno family associates, entered pleas of not guilty at their arraignments.
All the defendants are looking at a potential jail term of 20 years.
The arson was ordered by an enraged Asaro, who tracked down the owner of the car that cut him off near his Queens home, authorities said.
He then assigned a Bonanno associate to handle the task, and the mob wanna-be recruited Gotti and a third man. Young Gotti provided the getaway car, his Jaguar sedan, according to authorities.
When an unmarked police car spotted the trio and the burning car, Gotti outran the cops in his car — and dodged arrest for the next five years.
According to the indictment, Gotti and co-defendants Matthew (Fat Matt) Rullan (photo below) and Michael Guidici then conspired two weeks later on the holdup at the Maspeth Savings and Loan Association.
“I have a bomb,” read the note Guidici handed to the teller in the robbery. Rullan was also charged as the person who ignited the gasoline splashed on the vehicle by a third man.
Though the charge against Asaro dates back to 2012, authorities filed court papers noting the powerful veteran mobster remains an active member of the Bonanno family.
After beating the Lufthansa rap, he appeared at a 2015 Christmas party thrown by made members and associates of the Genovese crime family in Little Italy. THERE’S NO problem with the guilty verdict in the Etan Patz case, prosecutors argued in a new filing Wednesday.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office rejected claims of jury contamination made by lawyers for 56-year-old convicted killer Pedro Hernandez following reports the jury got improper information about members of the audience.
It took two trials and nine days of deliberation to convict Hernandez, a former bodega clerk, of murder and kidnapping in the 1979 abduction of 6-year-old Etan Patz in SoHo. The first trial resulted in a hung jury in 2015.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley is expected to rule on the defense motion to vacate the conviction on April 6. TWO BLADE-WIELDING men robbed a family in their Bronx home, cops said Wednesday.
The duo forced their way into the apartment on Claflin Ave. in Kingsbridge, brandishing a knife and a machete, around 3 a.m. on March 4, police said.
The robbers threatened a 47-year-old mother and her three sons, ages 13, 17 and 24, before swiping three gold chains from the apartment and fleeing.
No one was injured, authorities said.