Gennaro “Jerry” Bruno has entered into a plea agreement with the feds pleading guilty to racketeering the 2002 murder of Martin Bosshart and conspiring to prevent grand jury testimony.
Bruno a long-standing Gambino crime family associate served in a crew run by former consigliere Joseph “JoJo” Corozzo. He was a member of a violent gang known as the “young guns” before getting recruited into the New York mafia namely the powerful Gambino family of Cosa Nostra. According to the plea agreement, he will be sentenced to 21 years in prison in May.
“Gennaro Bruno”
According to the feds, Bruno participated in various crimes on behalf of the New York mob family, including drug trafficking, extortion, and murder. Bosshart was an associate of Bruno’s and helped in a Gambino family controlled drug scheme which moved high-potency product from Canada to New York. Court filings claim that Bosshart tried to exclude a Bruno co-conspirator from the drug business leading Bruno to plot his murder with other members of the Gambino family. The victim was lured to a Queens, NY location by Bruno and shot in the back of the head.
The feds say the defendant the conspired with others linked to the NY mafia to obstruct a grand jury investigation into the murder. He eluded justice for years all the time continuing his participation in other mafia crimes and activities on behalf of the Gambino family. He even used his standing with the mafia to extract extortion payments from a Queens based waste carting company before he was arrested in Las Vegas in 2014.
This drug out quite a while but seems like a plea was the only way for him to go in the end and for a body and other crimes they had him on 21 years isn’t all that bad a plea.
he got unlucky that others had big mouths and they implicated him he was never caught on tape. 21 years is not bad unless he is planning to cooperate
look at this old gangland article
The January 2, 2002 murder of Martin Bosshart allegedly stemmed from the gangster’s efforts to steal the drug business from a favored crew member of capo Alphonse Trucchio.
Bosshart, a violent hoodlum who beat an attempted murder rap when he was 19, was a major player in a multi-million dollar a year stolen car ring that was the first auto theft case to be brought under the state’s racketeering statutes at age 23 – in 1995, after a joint probe by Nassau police and the Queens District Attorney’s office.
When he died, Bosshart, 30 was a suspect in five murders and one theory was that he was killed because he had become a jailhouse snitch while doing his time.
In a tape-recorded conversation on November 3, 2009, Santos got a member of Trucchio’s crew, Todd LaBarca, to describe the hit. LaBarca said Michael (Roc) Roccaforte, was involved in the murder plot, but failed to answer the call to action when it came.
The hit team caught Bosshart at an unguarded moment. He was shot in the head while he was urinating on a deserted stretch of the Belt Parkway in Howard Beach, according to court papers. LaBarca, 40, and Roccaforte, 34, are among 18 of the 22 charged defendants who are awaiting trial in the racketeering, murder and drug dealing indictment that was unsealed in January.
Santos, 45, tape-recorded 18 of the indicted Gambinos while he was wearing a wire for the FBI, including consigliere Bartholomew (Bobby Glasses) Vernace.
The discussion with LaBarca took place two months before Trucchio spotted FBI agent Robert Herbster and Santos in his car on Queens Boulevard near the Gambino squad’s office and the feds decided to pull Santos off the streets for his own safety.
Prosecutors Elie Honig, John Zach and Daniel Chung plan to play the taped talk at trial, which is scheduled in March. Citing various grounds, lawyers Ronald Rubinstein and Alan Futerfas have asked Manhattan Federal Judge Richard Berman to block its use.
Santos, who had begun wearing a wire for the FBI in June 2009 after he was arrested as part of a big ticket burglary ring that operated in New York and New Jersey, was thrilled by the way he got LaBarca to finger himself, Roc and a third cohort for the slaying during a walk-talk.
After he got in his car, and right before he turned off the tape recording device, he is heard boasting on the tape: “Howard Santos. November third, five fifty two PM. Just cracked the murder of Marty Bosshart,” according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by Gang Land.
Before beginning the discussion, Santos put his cell phone in his car, and told LaBarca to do the same, ostensibly to assure him that “just in case, God forbid” the feds had bugged their phones, no one would be listening into their private talk.
“Maybe curiosity will kill the cat, but I got to ask you something,” he began. Then he mentioned that although turncoat mob associates John Alite and Peter (Bud) Zuccaro “were suspects who killed Marty,” he knew that “it wasn’t neither one of them.”
Santos quickly got LaBarca talking about things he knew he shouldn’t be discussing by stroking his ego.
First Santos voiced a question that kept coming into his mind: “Why does Al (Trucchio) keep coming to you as the go-to-guy to do something?” And then he answered it, “He knows that you’re a capable guy…”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” said LaBarca, who was hooked. “You know what, he tries to take credit for that …. There was a rumor that he got straightened out right after that, and people like, you know (assumed that Trucchio was involved in the hit.)”
LaBarca fingered mob associate Gennaro (Jerry) Bruno – who has not been charged but is behind bars for another conviction – as a quick-fingered triggerman who jumped the gun and fired the kill shot before LaBarca could. Codefendant Roccaforte, on the other hand, dogged it, said LaBarca: “He just didn’t answer” his phone “till like an hour later.”
Even though the younger, less capable Roc was “made” and LaBarca was still only an associate, he didn’t “hold that against him,” said LaBarca, adding that Santos was the “only person” he had ever told about the murder.
“You, I would trust with my life,” he said.
“Todd,” Santos lied before he closed the door of his BMW and drove away, “honestly, I’d die in the street before…” He left the rest of his pledge unstated. He didn’t have to spell it out. After all, what are friends for?
Bruno was an associate of jo jo corrozo’s crew , later when corrozo was made consigliere in the late 90s he was under alphonse trucchio