Veteran organized crime
reporter and author George Anastasia offers a piece at PhillyVoice.com on reputed
Philadelphia Cosa Nostra boss Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino.
He’s dodged bombs
And ducked bullets.
In the 1990s, two mob bosses
and a South Philadelphia drug kingpin targeted him for assassination.
He’s still standing … these
days more often than not on a golf course in Florida.
Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino
is a survivor.
And it looks as if he’s about
to walk away from his latest problem with federal authorities. The conventional
wisdom is that Merlino will beat the apparently flawed federal racketeering
charge pending against him in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
“We got them right where we
want them,” the 55-year-old mob leader has said to friends and associates.
It’s a line the charismatic
mobster has used throughout his checkered career while doing battle with
federal prosecutors and the FBI.
“He’s an eternal optimist,”
says a former mobster who was aligned with the anti-Merlino faction of the
South Philadelphia mob in the 1990s. “In that world, it’s important to be
smart. But it’s better to be lucky. Joey has always had good luck.”
Maybe not always.
He’s won and lost battles
with the feds, was wounded in a drive-by shooting that left one of his best
friends dead and has spent about half of his adult life in jail or on probation.
But he beat murder charges in two trials that could have landed him in prison
for the rest of his life. And he’s clearly ahead of the game in the
racketeering case that was announced with great fanfare last August by
prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (Manhattan). That case, with
Merlino and two Genovese crime family capos listed as the lead defendants, has
fizzled as more details about the questionable and at times ill-advised
investigation have surfaced.
Two FBI agents are targets of
an internal investigation into the way a key cooperating witness was
supervised, according to numerous reports coming out of New York. The Justice
Department probe has been referred to obliquely by federal prosecutors in documents
filed in the Southern District of New York and in more detail in a letter to
the judge that, like several other documents, has been filed under seal. More
important, federal prosecutors have offered plea deals to every defendant in
the case, offering to drop the most serious charge – conspiracy to commit
racketeering – in exchange for guilty pleas and lighter jail sentences for
charges like extortion and gambling.
To date, 39 of the 46
defendants in that case have taken the government up on its offer. Several
others are said to be close to reaching agreements.
But Merlino says he’s going
to trial.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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