File Photo
The charred remains of the vehicle that Gotti admitted to setting ablaze.
By Michael V. Cusenza
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has affirmed Bonanno organized crime family capo Vincent Asaro’s sentence for an April 2012 road rage-related arson in Howard Beach, federal officials announced on Tuesday.
“The district court did not exceed the bounds of its discretion when it sentenced Asaro to 96 months’ imprisonment followed by three years’ supervised release,” the three judges wrote in their five-page decision.
Asaro, 84, attempted to argue that U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross erred by considering conduct from his November 2015 trial—including the infamous 1978 Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy International Airport and the murder of Paul Katz in 1969 in Ozone Park—after which he was acquitted.
The Second Circuit disagreed with Asaro’s reasoning.
“The district court did not err when it considered acquitted conduct in sentencing Asaro. The court found Asaro’s long history of violent behavior to be proven by ‘not only just a preponderance of the evidence but by overwhelming evidence’ based on Asaro’s 2015 RICO trial at which the government presented evidence of crimes alleged to have been committed by Asaro during a period of over forty years,” according to the Second Circuit.
Asaro reasoned that the judges may only consider related acquitted conduct and that Asaro’s past alleged crimes—namely the Lufthansa job and the Katz slaying, among myriad others—are not related to the present crime because the arson was “the result of a personal vendetta fueled by road rage.”
“We are not persuaded,” the judges wrote. “Here, although the 1969 murder and the 1978 robbery did not ‘stem from a common nucleus of operative fact’ as the 2012 arson offense, those earlier offenses nevertheless informed the court’s assessment of the danger Asaro posed to the community, in light of his ‘lifelong history of violent crime,’ and spoke to the level of specific deterrence needed…That history also informed the district court’s understanding of the seriousness of the present crime. Asaro’s insistence that the instant offense ‘was not an organized crime-related [crime]’ is belief by the fact that he used organized-crime associates whom he could command because of his status as a crime boss. The crime was thus not merely an isolated instance, however reprehensible, of road rage, but an example of his continued ability to exert the power of the underworld to intimidate and harm law-abiding citizens.”
According to charging documents, in early April 2012, Asaro was traveling in a car in Howard Beach when he became enraged at another motorist who had cut him off at a traffic light. Asaro chased the other vehicle at a high rate of speed. Later, after obtaining the home address of the owner of the other vehicle, Asaro directed an associate of the Bonanno family to set fire to that vehicle. That associate then recruited John J. Gotti, grandson of the Teflon Don, and co-defendant Matthew “Fat Matt” Rullan to help him carry out the arson.
Gotti, the grandson of the late Gambino boss John Gotti, and Rullan drove in Gotti’s Jaguar sedan to a service station in the pre-dawn hours of April 4, 2012, where they filled a container with gasoline and proceeded to the residence of the owner of the other vehicle. The Bonanno associate doused the vehicle with gasoline and Rullan ignited it. A City police officer in an unmarked car observed the crime in progress and pursued the Jaguar on a high-speed chase through borough streets until he terminated the pursuit for safety reasons due to Gotti’s reckless driving.
