Salvatore Perrone was born in 1948, grew up in Bensonhurst, and by 2012 lived on Staten Island and worked as a traveling clothing salesman, carrying his stock in a duffel bag. He had once had ambitions in the garment trade: prosecutors said he had owned a successful Brooklyn clothing store, and in 2007 he trademarked his own name for a clothing line. The store closed, and by the year of the murders he was broke. "Maybe he blamed these storeowners for his demise," Assistant District Attorney Melissa Carvajal told the jury.
He killed three Brooklyn shopkeepers in 2012. Mohamed Gebeli, sixty-five, was found on July 6 inside his clothing shop in Bay Ridge with a single gunshot wound to the neck. On August 2 Isaac Kadare, fifty-nine, was shot in the head in his shop in Bensonhurst, and his throat was cut. On November 16 Rahmatollah Vahidipour, seventy-eight, was shot in the head, the face and the chest in his clothing shop in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. The New York press called him the Son of Sal.
He went in around closing time, when each man was alone, and used the same sawed-off rifle each time; he tried to hide each body under clothes and other goods from the shop. The attacks put shopkeepers across the borough on their guard for months. Two of the three victims were Jewish and the third was Muslim, but he was never charged with a hate crime. After the police released a surveillance photograph of a man carrying a duffel bag near one of the shops, a tipster recognized him, and he was arrested on November 20, 2012, four days after the last killing. The police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said it was reasonable to assume he would have killed again.
The evidence was heavy. In a duffel bag at his girlfriend's house detectives found a rifle and a knife. The rifle carried his fingerprint and matched the .22 caliber shell casings left at all three scenes, and blood from two of the victims was found on the knife and the bag. He also made statements implicating himself. The Brooklyn district attorney, Ken Thompson, called it a mountain of evidence.
He was convicted in February 2016 of three counts of second-degree murder and sentenced on March 4 to seventy-five years to life, the most the court could impose. Justice Alan D Marrus told him he was lucky New York had no death penalty and that he would have been a prime candidate for it. The Brooklyn district attorney said it was hard to think of anyone who deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison more.
He denied it throughout, and the sentencing hearing turned on that denial. He had been found fit to stand trial and had asked to represent himself, which the judge refused because his frequent outbursts would have made the proceedings a circus. At the sentencing he read from a typed script listing witnesses who had not been called for him and the names of men he said might be responsible. Relatives walked out during it.
Mohamed Gebeli's son said he had known Perrone for twenty years, and asked him why. He said that every time Perrone came to his father's shop it was near closing time and his father would stay open and wait for him, and that they had treated him with love and respect. Perrone answered that he had not shot his father, and tried to give him the address of where he said he had been at the time.
The judge set the case beside that of Colin Ferguson, who shot six people dead on a Long Island Rail Road train in 1993: both men had been found fit to proceed after psychiatric examination, both denied their guilt, both refused to work with their lawyers, and both offered the names of mysterious men who might be responsible. He noted that the evidence had included video, DNA, fingerprints and telephone records, and that the defendant was still in denial. Perrone's reply was that if he was lying they should hang him. He was taken to the cells carrying his court papers in a plastic trash bags.