Tony Lodi Is Out; Spilled the Beans on Fiumara Crew

Tino Fiumara was the major topic of discussion at
sealed courtroom proceeding.

Anthony "Tony Lodi" Cardinalle, indicted in early 2013, was once upon a time one of 30-plus defendants nailed following a multi-year FBI probe into the mob's control of the private sanitation industry in New York and New Jersey.

Cardinalle, a longtime Genovese associate, cooperated with the FBI and Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office. He plead guilty to two counts, racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit extortion, and copped to his role in a plot to shakedown a cooperating witness who owned a waste hauling company.


In the end, he was sentenced to 30 days and was released last month, on April 14.

He also was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and $3,400 that he extorted from Charles Hughes, the FBI informer (and pervert who helped sink the case.)

In fact because of Hughes, 19 mobsters and associates were sentenced in the case; charges against the others were unceremoniously dropped (after being ceremoniously announced).

The feds praised Cardinalle for his cooperation; his lawyer handed to the judge around 40 letters of praise from family, friends, employees, law enforcement officials--even the Mayor of Lodi and Johnny Pacheco, the legendary "father of Salsa." The music, not the sauce.

Hughes tape recorded more than 500 conversations from 2009 to 2012. 

Cardinalle introduced Hughes to Genovese mobster Peter LeConte and associate Frank Oliver in 2011 when Hughes' co-defendant Howard Ross made a proposal to him about creating a new garbage business.

Those would be interesting transcripts to get a hold off as, according to Gangland News, Tony Lodi "spill[ed] his guts about a real Garden State mob crew that was run for years by powerhouse Genovese capo Tino Fiumara," a bloody story about which we've previously written in: Decades of Mob Violence Behind Recent Waterfront Case: "The family's powerful waterfront capo Tino Fiumara was supposedly part of a three-man panel running the family at the time of his death in 2010." 

Fiumara controlled Newark/Elizabeth Seaport-based unions and engaged in loansharking, extortion, gambling, and union and labor racketeering throughout the New Jersey counties of Union, Essex and Bergen. The Feds attribute around a dozen murders to Fiumara, who once belonged to a Genovese family hit squad known to have murdered federal informants on the street.