Skinny Joey: Feds "Wanted to Stick It Up My Ass"

They tried to stick it up Merlino's ass, he said.....

From Big Trial: "They owe me four months," Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino quipped during a phone interview this afternoon, adding, "I hope they just leave me alone. I'm not doing anything wrong."

Last month, when the appellate court announced it was vacating the lower court order that sent Merlino back to jail, his lawyer, Edwin Jacobs Jr. declared that "my client has served a four-month sentence for doing absolutely nothing wrong."

But that's not exactly the legal takeaway from the split decision of the appellate court that was made public today.





Merlino is back in Boca Raton where he is the front man for a posh Italian restaurant called Merlino's.

The appellate court never took up the broader defense argument that there was not sufficient evidence to support the allegation that Merlino had knowingly consorted with fellow South Philadelphia mobster John Ciancaglini in a Boca Raton cigar bar while on supervised release.

Instead, in a split 2-to-1 decision, the appellate judges found that Merlino had not been served a summons prior to the expiration of his three-year probation period and as a result, the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia no longer had jurisdiction.

Timing is everything. And in this case, the feds dropped the ball.

The irony is that they had plenty of time to meet the deadline, but opted instead to wait until the last minute to cite Merlino, a strategy that has been employed in other cases in the past and one that defense attorneys and defendants deem petty and personal.

"They wanted to stick it up my ass," Merlino said of the decision to file a probation violation charge literally at the 11th hour.

Read the background and the rest of George Anastasia's story