Convicted mobster Vincent Basciano, who is also known by the sobriquet Vinny Gorgeous, was once ready to kill federal prosecutor Greg Andres, now a top official in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, according to ex-mob capo Dominick Cicale.
Cicale’s testimony, delivered in the penalty phase of Basciano’s trial as federal prosecutors seek to have Basciano put to death, added an exclamation point on an episode that has already featured vivid glimpses of life in the underworld. Last week, Basciano was convicted of murder for ordering a hit on mob associate Randolph Pizzolo.
At the time, in the mid 2000s, Andres was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. And what was Andres’s “offense,” at least from the perspective of Basciano and his wise guy pals?
Well, he had helped to take down part of the Bonanno crime family for starters. Perhaps just as bad, every Thursday night he dined at Campagnola’s, an Upper East Side restaurant whose clientele, according to a review in New York magazine, is “urban-country club” and made up in part of “bejeweled, heavily made-up women on the arms of dapper older men.”
Not incidentally, Cicale said, the restaurant is “under the protection” of Genovese family capo Dominick (Quiet Dom) Cirillo , according to an account in The New York Daily News.
“Cicale said that Basciano got a message in the spring of 2004 from a private eye who had visited then-Bonanno boss Joseph Massino in prison,” The Daily News said. It seems Massino wanted to let Vinny Gorgeous know that Andres had been “disrespectful,” and that he dined at the restaurant every Thursday.
In documents filed as part of the penalty phase, prosecutors introduced portions of tape recorded conversations between Basciano and Massino in which Basiciano, referring to Andres says, “Listen, this prosecutor, I can’t underestimate him because he’s a dirty, rotten c—sucker.”
Anyhow, Basciano interpreted that information as an order to kill Andres in the restaurant. “Vincent Basciano would go into the restaurant in a baseball cap, walk up to Greg Andres and shoot him,” Cicale said, according to The Daily News. Basciano wanted to do the job himself because “the hit had to be done right,” Cicale said. Luckily for Andres, the order was never confirmed, or maybe lines of communication get frayed in the mob world, as they do in more mundane businesses. (We decided there must be a reason for Quiet Dom’s nickname, so we did not try to contact him for comment.)
Basciano, 51, is already serving a life sentence for the shotgun murder of Bronx junkie Frank Santoro, The Daily News reminded us, so he’s unlikely to visit Campagnola’s anytime soon.
