Cosa Nostra News

Back in 2014, despite the heartfelt pleas of a murdered man's daughter, Brooklyn Federal Judge John Gleeson sentenced Hector (Junior) Pagan to 11 years in prison —and offered a thoughtful comment. James Donovan was killed during a botched robbery in 2010. He said, “We can only hope” that by time Pagan is released “we have prepared him for re-entry into society to mitigate the risk” of what would happen if Pagan returned to a life of crime. How far Judge Gleeson's hope gets us is something we will discover very soon. The former Bonanno associate/Mob Wives bit player is getting out of the can in a few months..... He is currently residing at the Brooklyn RRM (a halfway house where he and other Federal offenders receive "community-based services that will assist with their reentry needs.") Pagan's official reentry date is April 18, 2021. Renee Graziano's ex-husband got a reduced sentence in 2014 because he flipped and testified against two cohorts who were involve...

Pagan should be out of prison in about six years Brooklyn Federal Judge John Gleeson doled out to Hector "Junior" Pagan an 11-year prison term for a criminal career overflowing with drug dealing and the violence of armed robberies and kidnapping. Pagan also was the shooter who killed Luchese associate James Donovan during a street heist for which two of Pagan's former cohorts have gone away for 36 years each, due in part to Pagan's own testimony. According to Gangland News: "Sources say he didn't expect to be hit with a double-digit stretch behind bars because he had testified against his cohorts in the Donovan slaying and had worn a wire against top Bonanno family mobsters." Donovan's family made the same presentation for the judge that they did last month at the sentencing of Richard Riccardi and Luigi Grasso.

Pagan testified at a murder trial in  which he was the actual murderer. Recently the  WSJ.com ran a story about a "rare and risky legal strategy" used by prosecutors. Turns out they even have a name for it: Testifying down. Guess who they were referring to! (Well, at least he's still in the clink, as we learn..) In two recent cases in Brooklyn, one of which was the  James Donovan  murder trial, in which Pagan testified,  "... [t]he government used cooperating witnesses—"big fish"—who admitted to more serious crimes than the charges faced by the people they were testifying against. "This is, generally speaking, the opposite of how cooperating witnesses work. Usually, legal experts said, the goal is to get those witnesses to admit to wrongdoing, cooperate with the government and to walk the investigation up the ladder, obtaining evidence against leaders or those potentially engaged in more serious crimes. In exchange, on the recommendatio...