Pain ‘remains’
Daughter brings pa’s ashes to mob sentencing
THE DAUGHTER of a gangland murder victim whacked more than four decades ago brought her father’s cremated remains to Brooklyn Federal Court for the sentencing of the Bonanno thug who disposed of her dad’s corpse.
Ilsa Katz recalled the night of Dec. 6, 1969, when her father, Paul Katz, left the house to “meet the guys at the candy store” while his five children watched the “Frosty the Snowman” cartoon on TV.
“My mother begged him not to go,” said Isla who was 9 at the time. “He never came back.”
Paul Katz, a low-level mob associate, was allegedly strangled with a dog chain by Bonanno gangster Vincent Asaro, who suspected him of being an informant, and James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke, who was immortalized by Robert De Niro in the film “Goodfellas.”
Katz’s corpse was buried under the basement floor of a Queens house owned by Burke and left to rot there until the 1980s when Asaro’s son, Jerome, exhumed the decomposed remains and moved them to an unknown location.
“When they killed my father, they killed a family,” Ilsa Katz told Federal Judge Allyne Ross.
Then in June 2013, the FBI excavated the basement grave and recovered bits of bone and hair that were positively identified as Paul Katz through DNA testing.
“He came home with me carrying him in an evidence bag,” the victim’s son Lawrence Katz told the judge.
The remains were cremated and Isla Katz had them in a cloth pouch inside her handbag as she trembled and tearfully described the torment of growing up not only without a father, but not knowing what had happened to him.
“When we were asked, ‘Where’s your father?’ we’d say he died in a plane crash,” she said.
Jerome Asaro apologized to his own family and the government, but offered no words of remorse to the Katz children for what he or his father had done.
Ross sentenced him to 7½ years in prison for racketeering, which included accessory to murder after the fact. Vincent Asaro is awaiting trial for the murder as well as for his participation in the infamous 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport.
“He may not have killed Paul Katz himself, but he helped (his father) get away with it,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicole Argentieri. “The Mafia is a family business and he (Jerome) is a third-generation member of the Bonanno family.”