NY - Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, Gambino Crime Family, Shot Dead, Staten Island Mar 2019 Arrest

[Seattle1]

What mob boss killer said after he gunned down the head of the Gambino crime family outside his home | Daily Mail Online

• Anthony Comello, 24, frantically typed out a text message, reading ‘I’m on the run,’ and ‘My family is marked,’ moments after reportedly killing Frank Cali
• He was indicted for Cali’s murder in the second-degree in April, and he appeared in court yesterday requesting to be released from jail on a $1 million bail
• Comello’s attorney, Robert Gottlieb insisted upon his prospective release, the 24-year-old would be placed into the care of his parents
• However since the murder prosecutors say family relations are fraught and volunteers to supervise Comello's bail will be in short supply
• Comello allegedly drove to Cali's Staten Island home on March 13 and backed his pickup truck into the mobster's Cadillac Escalade and shot him 10 times

By LUKE KENTON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 23:52 EDT, 9 May 2019 | UPDATED: 03:20 EDT, 10 May 2019

The man accused of killing Gambino crime boss Francesco Cali outside of his Staten Island home allegedly said he knew his own life was in danger the second he pulled the trigger, a court heard on Thursday.

Prosecutors say Anthony Comello, 24, frantically typed out a text message, reading ‘I’m on the run,’ and ‘My family is marked,’ moments after reportedly administering the tenth and final shot into Cali’s back.

He was indicted for Cali’s murder in the second-degree in April, and he appeared in court yesterday requesting to be released from jail on a $1 million bond.

Attempting to better his client’s standing, Comello’s attorney, Robert Gottlieb insisted that upon his prospective release, Comello would be placed into the care of his parents.

Judge William Garnett however said that despite the defendant having more than 40 family members living in Staten Island, the threat of what law enforcement call a potential retaliation from the mob means his parents would likely be unable – or unwilling - to supervise him upon his release, for their own safety.

‘The family ties… in my judgement are now non-existent since the shooting,’ Garnett ruled.

 

[Seattle1]

Anthony Comello expressed fear for his safety, and that of his kin, immediately following the March 13 slaying of Gambino crime family boss Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali outside his Todt Hill home, Staten Island prosecutor Carrie Low said in court.

“After the shooting, he was sending text messages saying, ‘I’m on the run. My family is marked,'” Low said.

During a bail hearing for the 24-year-old construction worker, defense lawyer Robert Gottlieb said Comello’s family was willing to post a $1 million bond so he could be released to electronically monitored house arrest.

Gottlieb also said Comello’s father, a retired concrete laborer, “very much wanted to be here today,” but skipped the court session “based on advice from law enforcement.”

Law enforcement sources have told The Post authorities anticipate an assassination attempt against Comello, with one source saying that “the general feeling is that there’s an ‘X’ on this guy’s back.”

Comello, who was hauled into court wearing khaki scrubs and a fresh haircut, remained handcuffed and surrounded by court officers throughout the hearing.

He did not speak and was largely emotionless, but began bouncing his right leg toward the end of the proceeding, when Gottlieb said he planned to mount an insanity defense and Low said she would seek to have Comello examined by a shrink.

https://nypost.com/2019/05/09/accused-mob-boss-killer-worried-his-family-is-marked-prosecutor-says/

ETA: Comello is due back in court Aug. 13.

 

[Seattle1]

‘I’m on the run, my family is marked’ -- New details emerge on alleged mob-boss killer

Anthony Comello, 24, was indicted in April for second-degree murder in connection with the incident, and appeared in court Thursday alongside his attorney, Robert Gottlieb, to request he be released from jail on a $1 million bond.

“The parents are good responsible people,” said Gottlieb, referencing Comello’s retired father who worked construction and his mother, who had worked for nearly 30 years as a manager for Bloomberg. “The family had to guarantee and also support that bond by putting up their life savings and more.”

Justice William Garnett ruled that despite having Staten Island roots and a large extended family living in the borough, the shooting in March and what law enforcement officials have deemed a threat of retaliation from the mob calls into question whether Comello or any of his family members would live up to any circumstances on which he might be released.

“The family ties.. in my judgment are now non existent since the shooting,” said Garnett.

[...]

“Prior to this homicide, your honor, the defendant’s family wanted him out of their home,” said Assistant District Attorney Carrie Low. “They were encouraging him to get an apartment of his own.”

Low said the family’s house on Staten Island is up for sale, each member of the family is in hiding at a different location out of fear of retaliation, and despite about 40 members of Comello’s family living on Staten Island, no one has showed up for any of his court appearances.

In an ongoing bid by the district attorney’s office to establish premeditation, prosecutors said surveillance footage shows Comello casing the house, and at one point walking up to the porch.

 

[Seattle1]

Mob Still In NJ? 3 Big Organized Crime Cases In 2019

 

[meanmaryjean]

Damn Skippy- this case!

 

[angelainwi]

WOW, this case just got way stranger, now that new court documents are out...

"The reality, according to his lawyer, appears to be even more bizarre: Mr. Comello had become convinced that Mr. Cali was part of the so-called deep state, a cabal of criminals that conspiracy theorists claim controls the United States government. Mr. Comello also believed he was a chosen vigilante of President Trump.

“Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself, and that he had the president’s full support,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote."

He Wasn’t Seeking to Kill a Mob Boss. He Was Trying to Help Trump, His Lawyer Says.

 

[angelainwi]

More from the above article:

"QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory that originated on internet message boards, played a key role in Mr. Comello’s descent into mental instability, his lawyer said. It claims, among other things, that America is controlled by a “deep state,” that prominent Democratic politicians are pedophiles and that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash, is secretly alive and will run for president in 2020.

At Mr. Comello’s first court appearance in March, he displayed symbols and phrases associated with QAnon scrawled on his hand in pen. He first began to take an interest in political conspiracy theories, Mr. Gottlieb said, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.

“Mr. Comello’s support for ‘QAnon’ went beyond mere participation in a radical political organization,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. “It evolved into a delusional obsession.”

 

[angelainwi]

More from the article and this is getting downright scary, he could have easily possibly killed members of our government:

"Driven by that obsession, Mr. Gottlieb said, Mr. Comello began early this year to attempt citizen’s arrests of people he believed to be associated with the deep state. In February, Mr. Comello twice tried to conduct his own arrest of Mayor Bill de Blasio, including one instance in which he showed up at Gracie Mansion, the mayoral home in Manhattan.

Not long after that incident, Mr. Comello sought the help of United States marshals at Federal District Court in Manhattan, and asked that they help him to arrest two California Democrats, Representatives Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, both of whom he believed were in the vicinity. He was rebuffed."

 

[angelainwi]

Info on his social media:

"Mr. Gottlieb identified one of Mr. Comello’s accounts, RealAmericasVoice_ on Instagram, in his filing. The page has dozens of memes and written screeds, some that are difficult to decipher, including several posted days before Mr. Cali’s death.

One post accuses Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, of being a fascist. “Patriot sleeper cells are awake,” he wrote in another. Yet another refers to Bill and Hillary Clinton as “The Clinton Crime Family.”

 

[meanmaryjean]

I repeat - damn Skippy!

Although this makes about as much sense as anything else.....

 

[cass523]

Deleted Repeat

 

[NJSleuth91]

Wow I just found out about this case today while reading up on QAnon (which is pretty wild in itself). What an insane case....I'm really surprised I never heard about it before considering I live not too far away.

More from the above article:

"QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory that originated on internet message boards, played a key role in Mr. Comello’s descent into mental instability, his lawyer said. It claims, among other things, that America is controlled by a “deep state,” that prominent Democratic politicians are pedophiles and that John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash, is secretly alive and will run for president in 2020.

At Mr. Comello’s first court appearance in March, he displayed symbols and phrases associated with QAnon scrawled on his hand in pen. He first began to take an interest in political conspiracy theories, Mr. Gottlieb said, in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s 2016 election.

“Mr. Comello’s support for ‘QAnon’ went beyond mere participation in a radical political organization,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. “It evolved into a delusional obsession.”

Some insight into the psychology that may have inspired this:

"Disillusionment can also come from the failure of the theories' predictions [....] For some these failures began the process of separation from QAnon, while others urged direct action in the form of an insurrection against the government. Such a response to a failed prophecy is not unusual: apocalyptic cults such as Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, the Manson Family, and Aum Shinrikyo resorted to mass suicide or mass murder when their expectations for revelations or the fulfillment of their prophecies did not come about. Psychologist Robert Lifton calls it "forcing the end". This phenomenon is being seen among some QAnon believers. Travis View echoes the concern that disillusioned QAnon believers might take matters into their own hands, as Pizzagate believer Edgar Maddison Welch did in 2016, Matthew Phillip Wright did at Hoover Dam in 2018, and Anthony Comello did in 2019 when he murdered Mafia boss Frank Cali, believing himself to be under the protection of [the government]."

“Prior to this homicide, your honor, the defendant’s family wanted him out of their home,” said Assistant District Attorney Carrie Low. “They were encouraging him to get an apartment of his own.”

I think his descent into delusions and paranoia was likely years in the making (and it's possible his drug habit was related, either as a way to temporarily quell his mental unrest or a factor in precipitating it). His family likely had at least some awareness of his issues, but little recourse to stop the progression (it can be very difficult to deal with these situations where you have an adult that is acting erratically and there are no good options).

“Even Gotti had more respect,” one police source told The Post. “He did it out in Manhattan.”

I love how this police source is just casually trashing Staten Island.

 

[NJSleuth91]

BTW I also really doubt the mafia is going to attempt any retaliation against this guy or his family. It would be too obvious. They aren't going to jeopardize their other operations and put themselves in the crosshairs of an investigation just to get revenge on a guy who is obviously delusional. They've been successful as an enterprise for a long time and you don't stay successful without being strategic.

That's not to say that they aren't going to perpetually scare him and his family members into thinking something might happen, though.

 

[Seattle1]

BTW I also really doubt the mafia is going to attempt any retaliation against this guy or his family. It would be too obvious. They aren't going to jeopardize their other operations and put themselves in the crosshairs of an investigation just to get revenge on a guy who is obviously delusional. They've been successful as an enterprise for a long time and you don't stay successful without being strategic.

That's not to say that they aren't going to perpetually scare him and his family members into thinking something might happen, though.

Retaliation? Oh it's going to happen. Maybe another generation but it's going to happen!

MOO

 

[cass523]

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A judge denied a motion to suppress the statements Anthony Comello made to investigators shortly after he was arrested and accused of killing Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali outside the victim’s Staten Island home seven months ago.

The inconsistent statements were revealed during a pre-trial hearing when portions of the three-and-a-half-hour interrogation conducted on March 16 were played before Justice William E. Garnett on Oct. 30, the Advance previously reported.

Dressed in a blue suit and a blue shirt, a tired-looking Comello entered the court room Thursday morning and emotionlessly looking at the side where some family members where sitting.

On Wednesday, Dec. 4, a doctor from the district attorney’s office went to evaluate Comello on his mental state, but Comello refused to cooperate, Judge Garnett said.

Garnett then said he will expected to receive mental evaluation from both the defense and the prosecution by Jan. 3, 2020 and he will then review both evaluations and the videotape of the Dec. 4 interview."

Comello is due back in court on Jan. 10, 2020.

Alleged mob-boss killer refuses to cooperate during mental evaluation

 

[Seattle1]

12/5/19

During the interrogation [March 16], Comello, 25, told a detective he killed Cali, the head of the Gambino crime family, because Cali threatened to have him killed after Comello hit his SUV on the street.

Later on, Comello changed his story, saying he had been blackmailed into killing Cali by “people” who threatened to reveal how he contracted HIV from a stripper.

The 25-year-old man also provided a third account, saying he had actually gone to the victim’s house to “spill the beans” and warn him that organized crime had ordered a hit on him.

Robert Gottlieb, Comello’s lawyer, previously argued his client’s statements should be suppressed due to his physical and mental state at the time of the interview.

The videotape of the interrogation showed Comello telling a detective he took HIV medicine, vomiting into a wastebasket, requesting medical attention and complaining about the feds watching over everyone.

“They knew he had HIV and takes medication. They knew it was violent vomiting,” Gottlieb told the court. “The pain is so severe that the questioning is tantamount to keeping him in a coercive environment against his will. It all adds up, not only the physical illness, but the paranoia that renders the statement involuntary. It is the totality of the circumstances.”

Alleged mob-boss killer refuses to cooperate during mental evaluation

 

[Nadal]

Retaliation? Oh it's going to happen. Maybe another generation but it's going to happen!

MOO

There's next to no chance there will be retaliation in this day and age. There's mob informants who put away very powerful people not in WITSEC, just travelling around freely, giving interviews, even visiting old friends in mobbed up areas and they don't get touched. The mob has had an upswing in the last decade after the disastrous 90s to mid 2000s where someone new flipped every week and mobsters could barely last a year on the street. There's a few reasons for that and one of the main ones is for the most part (there's a couple of exceptions like the Crea/Madonna stuff right now) they've cut out murders. Due to such a reduction of violence on the mobs part the FBI in NY cut their units from one for each family to two covering all five families, and with no murder charges and the mobsters being allowed to take plea deals now they aren't constantly faced with life sentences which reduces the amount of informants. Killing this nutjob would be terrible for the mob, could result in the FBI shifting their focus towards them heavily again and as they saw in the 90s and 2000s in this day and age with RICO and WITSEC this will only result in life sentences and decimation of the crime families.

The only way Comello is killed by the mob is if he ends up in GenPop with mobsters who are serving life with nothing to lose same as happened with Bulger. There's not going to be any planned coordinated attack though and nothing will happen to his family, it's not the 50s anymore.

 

[cass523]

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Four days after Gambino boss Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali was killed outside his Hilltop Terrace home, members of the mob family organized a “clandestine meeting” on Staten Island, as they launched their own investigation into the murder, prosecutors say.

Andrew Campos, 50, who prosecutors identified as a captain in the Gambino family, and Vincent Fiore, 57, an alleged Gambino soldier, met with multiple other high-level crime family members to discuss the then-unclear circumstances surrounding Cali’s death, the U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of New York, wrote in a detention memo that was unsealed on Thursday afternoon.

The detention memo does not detail where exactly on Staten Island the group met.

In the following days, Campos and Fiore, of Scarsdale, N.Y., and Briarcliff, N.Y., respectively, actively helped the Gambino family investigate the murder, the memo alleges.

The day after the meeting, on March 18, Fiore talked to his ex-wife about the session, telling her that he and Campos met with “a half dozen” people, prosecutors wrote in the memo.

Fiore also told her that he had seen the surveillance video of Cali’s slaying and speculated on a possible motive “relating to a woman” who had been at the Hilltop Terrace home on the day of the slaying, the memo says.

Prosecutors do not specifically say who that woman could have been.

The accused Gambino soldier affectionately called Cali “Frankie” and described him as someone who “was loved," according to the memo.

A GOOD THING’

Fiore, however, had started discussing Cali’s murder the morning after he died, when he received a call from James Ciaccia, 51, of the Bronx, an accused Gambino family soldier, according to the memo.

On March 16, Anthony Comello, 25, of Eltingville, was arrested in connection with the slaying.

He has been in jail since then and made several inconsistent statements to investigators when he detailed what happened that night in March.

On Thursday morning, Justice William E. Garnett denied a motion to suppress the statements Comello made to investigators."


Feds: Gambinos called ‘clandestine meeting’ on S.I. to investigate Cali killing

Continues with MOB BUST

 

[Seattle1]

Feds: Gambinos called ‘clandestine meeting’ on S.I. to investigate Cali killing

Dec 5, 2019

MOB BUST

The details about the Gambino family meeting were revealed after the Eastern District of New York announced the arrests of 10 alleged members and associates of the Gambino family on Thursday.

The defendants are facing charges that span from racketeering conspiracy, bribery, loansharking, fraud, obstruction of justice and related offenses.

None of the people arrested are from Staten Island.

“The outstanding investigative work by this office’s prosecutors and our law enforcement partners uncovered a litany of crimes allegedly committed by members and associates of the Gambino organized crime family, who still don’t get it – handcuffs and a jail cell are waiting for criminals who threaten violence and commit fraud, money laundering and bribery in furtherance of their enterprise,” said United States Attorney Richard P. Donoghue. ^^bbm

The arrests, conducted in conjunction with the FBI, the NYPD, the IRS and the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, were based on alleged crimes that occurred since 2013.

 

[cass523]

"Two mob soldiers were caught on a wiretap discussing the slaying of a Mafia boss on Staten Island — with one calling it “a good thing” because their captain would likely gain power as a result, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

The cold-hearted calculation was revealed in court papers tied to charges against 13 reputed Gambino crime family members and associates in a laundry list of crimes that date back to 2013.

“This investigation makes clear that the Gambino family is thriving, earning millions of dollars through various forms of fraud, bribery, money laundering and extortion, particularly in the construction industry, and distributes these illicit proceeds to other members and associates of La Cosa Nostra,” Brooklyn federal prosecutors Keith Edelman and Kayla Bensing wrote."

https://nypost.com/2019/12/05/case-...embers-shows-gambino-family-is-thriving-feds/