10Stuck GPS on wiseguy’s ride
Feds: Crew on video with device days before Bonanno hood slain
A reputed Bronx mobster gunned down at a McDonald’s drive-thru was targeted for death by killers using a hidden GPS device.
Federal prosecutors revealed Friday that Sylvester (Sally Daz) Zottola, a longtime associate of the Bonanno organized crime family, was murdered five days after the plotters surreptitiously placed the tracking device under his car.
Zottola, 71, was fatally shot five times as he waited for a cup of coffee behind the wheel on Oct. 4. Five suspects accused in his death could face the death penalty in the mob execution.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsay Gerdes said after detectives discovered the device beneath the dead Mafioso’s car, they reviewed closed-circuit television footage close to where the device was first activated.
“Sure enough, you see some of the defendants handling the tracking device,” said prosecutor Gerdes — adding the GPS tracker was first activated on Sept. 29.
Telephone records confirmed Bushawn (Shelz) Shelton, Herman (Taliban) Blanco, Arthur Codner, Himen Ross and Kalik McFarlane plotted to kill Zottola and his son Salvatore, as did evidence showing Shelton’s car parked near the victim’s residence on 20 different occasions in the months prior to his killing, court papers allege.
At their joint court appearance in Brooklyn Federal Court on Friday, the defendants sat in shackles while prosecutors rolled out the damning new revelations.
Defense attorneys for the accused men asked U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie to lift an order requested previously by prosecutors to prevent the co-defendants from discussing the case with one another. Dearie asked the government to reconsider its position, but Gerdes indicated that prosecutors had a reason for their request.
“These defendants have all communicated with one another in furtherance of a plot to kill two people,” charged Gerdes. “One of those people is dead.”
Zottola’s son Salvatore, 41, had survived a July 11 murder attempt outside his waterfront home in the Bronx — a hit ordered in an effort to “lure out” the father, according to a federal criminal complaint. Two of the suspects drove to his house to lie in wait, but Salvatore never appeared that day, the complaint said.
His father similarly escaped death in multiple threatening incidents over the past year, including a December 2017 attack inside his Bronx apartment where three masked invaders stabbed Sylvester Zottola repeatedly in the neck and chest.