The Murderous Mob Rat....
"Junior" |
"He went around for months trying to help them find the murderer when it was him. It's hard to think of a bigger fraud than that. And he was waving to the guys he was taping not to say anything about the murder so the DEA wouldn't know. He is just about as dirty as anyone gets, forget about government witnesses. How do they embrace this guy? Why give this guy an opportunity to walk out of jail to put my guy away for life."
Wonder who will be lucky enough to be his new neighbor out there in the midwest. Good luck folks, cause this guys is a sociopath with no hope of redemption. We'd love him to prove us wrong....
Yes, all things considered, it seems quite likely that Hector "Junior" Pagan will not suffer the severe punishment scenario upon which we ruminated last week.
According to his cooperation agreement the feds will not prosecute Hector "Junior" Pagan for 16 separate crimes committed over a 30-year period ending with his arrest.
He will not be prosecuted for armed robbery/conspiracy to commit armed robbery; burglary; extortion/extortion conspiracy; assault, including assault with a deadly weapon; kidnapping; attempted murder; illegal firearms possession; use of one or more firearms in connection with a violent crime; illegal gambling; lying to law enforcement, the DEA, specifically; car theft; larceny; receipt of stolen property; marijuana distribution/distribution conspiracy.
And, Hector "Junior" Pagan will not be prosecuted for the murder of check casher James Donovan.
A fourth mobster had also been involved in the Donovan heist/murder. Mob associate Nunzio "Nicky" DeCarlo, a long-time drug abuser, died three months following the murder at age 46.
Susan Kellman, defense attorney for Richard Riccardi -- he and his codefendant, Louis (Luigi) Grasso, aka Ronnie Petrino, were convicted for the robbery and murder of Donovan and handed 36 years each -- said it best in an interview.
"I just can't understand how the government has no problem letting the shooter go so they can put two guys who only wanted to rob him away for life," she said.
Decades ago when former U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani was at the height of his mob-busting Tom Dewey act, the defense bar was not at all pleased with the top-down law enforcement effort against the New York Mafia. Lower East Side drug addicts -- okay, let's just say it, junkies collapsed in puddles of their own piss, shit and vomit were "recruited" by the Feds to testify against their connected drug dealers.
Defense attorneys didn't care for these tactics -- because they tended to work sometimes --- but at least the strategy made obvious sense, Kellman noted.
"Then they would clean [the junkies] up, find out where they bought the drugs, and they would work their way up the chain to get to the top. We defense lawyers complain about giving a junkie 10 years to make him flip against the big guys, but it makes sense."
Pagan's case, however, makes no sense, she added.
"Why do you start with the shooter, and work your way down the food chain?" asked Kellman. "By all accounts, neither defendant is someone worth the federal government's time or energy. Nothing about this case couldn't have been dealt with in state court."
Kellman further highlighted the fact that trial prosecutors did everything within their power to keep every DEA agent involved in the case the hell off the witness stand.
Why?
Because Pagan lied to them for the five months during which he wore a wire to tape record his cohorts, including his own father-in-law.
"In Hebrew, there's a word for coffee with milk that translates to coffee upside down —café hafuch. That's what this case is like," she said. "It's not just that Pagan was the shooter. This guy was an art form. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars. They got him a court appointed lawyer. He wore a wire for months while he was helping them find who did the murder without mentioning that it was him.
"That was the big lie. He went around for months trying to help them find the murderer when it was him. It's hard to think of a bigger fraud than that. And he was waving to the guys he was taping not to say anything about the murder so the DEA wouldn't know. He is just about as dirty as anyone gets, forget about government witnesses. How do they embrace this guy? Why would you give this guy an opportunity to walk out of jail to put my guy away for life."
How indeed... What exactly has Pagan accomplished for the Feds?
Pagan began wearing a wire in 2011 for the DEA. Pagan helped them nab his ex-father-in-law, capo TG Graziano, and five others on racketeering and/or extortion charges. DEA agents had been very focused on the Bonannos, especially then-acting boss Vincent "Vinny TV" Badalamenti, following a 2009 raid on a Bonanno Christmas party that was believed by the agents to have been an induction ceremony at the Banner Social Club in Bensonhurst.
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and NYPD detectives were planning to charge all three suspects with murder. But since the DEA had already recruited Pagan, federal prosecutors handed sweet plea deals to Graziano and acting boss Vinny TV Badalamenti.The feds did this to avoid the horror of having to put Pagan on the witness stand, which is exactly what happened anyway. Confusing, isn't it?
Pagan, it was later learned, actually started to snitch in 2006, when he earned $15,000 as a paid informer for the FBI. He did this, as he told assistant U.S. attorney Nicole Argentieri, "to take the focus off myself" and tell the FBI about the crimes of other gangsters.
Under cross examination by defense lawyers, Pagan, 47, admitted that he continued running scams even after cooperating. He lied to FBI agents, judges, gangsters, relatives and friends, as well as DEA agents who investigated the Donovan robbery and arrested Grasso and Riccardi.
Fourth Mobster Was Involved
A fourth mobster had also been involved in the Donovan heist/murder. Mob associate Nunzio "Nicky" DeCarlo, a long-time drug abuser, died three months following the murder at age 46. He was released from prison in 2003 -- he'd served decades for a 1986 murder committed while Nicky was a member of Greg Scarpa Jr.’s crew.
In March 2010, Donovan became the subject of an investigation: According to the WSJ, Donovan was being investigated by the Business Integrity Commission, a city agency overseeing private garbage haulers and other businesses, when he was murdered.
On the day of the murder, BIC investigators were monitoring by camera a business in Gravesend, Brooklyn, where they knew Donovan made weekly transactions. According to court records, a glitch caused the camera to stop recording as the fatal robbery started. [We noticed that the story has since been changed to omit that fact. Wonder why....] However, investigators said they found surveillance footage from nearby stores and discarded cigarette butts that put the three men at the scene at the time of the murder.
On the day of the murder, BIC investigators were monitoring by camera a business in Gravesend, Brooklyn, where they knew Donovan made weekly transactions. According to court records, a glitch caused the camera to stop recording as the fatal robbery started. [We noticed that the story has since been changed to omit that fact. Wonder why....] However, investigators said they found surveillance footage from nearby stores and discarded cigarette butts that put the three men at the scene at the time of the murder.
Authorities believed he was collecting insurance checks from auto-body shops for a fee and giving the shops the cash value of the checks. The shops would pocket the money without declaring it, allowing them to avoid paying taxes. The investigation found that Donovan was cashing more than $1 million worth of these checks a year through connections at check-cashing stores and clearing more than $100,000 annually from the alleged scheme.
James Donovan. |
Weeks later detectives followed a trail from a bank surveillance camera to find a man spotted depositing the stolen checks—and who was subsequently arrested on an unrelated narcotics charge—placed calls from Rikers Island that were ultimately traced to a parolee, Nunzio "Nicky" DeCarlo.
Federal prosecutors identified DeCarlo as a member of the Colombo crime family when he was arrested in 1987 on racketeering charges. He was later convicted and served 18 years in prison. Those calls plus other clues, including DNA from discarded cigarette butts that Detective McMahon had collected from the scene and phone taps—another almost unheard-of tactic for the Business Integrity Commission—led investigators over the following months to three other men: Hector "Junior" Pagan, Richard Riccardi and Luigi Grasso.
DeCarlo died in October 2010 at his Staten Island home from an overdose of drugs, including heroin, according to the New York City Medical Examiner's office. On July 11, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Riccardi and Grasso on charges of robbery conspiracy, causing death through the use of a firearm and using or carrying a firearm. They pleaded not guilty and were ordered held without bail.
If Janine Donovan reads this and would like to get in touch, we urge her to do so.
eddie2843@gmail.com
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