Salvatore Perrone was born in 1948, lived on Staten Island and worked as a travelling clothing salesman. He was sixty-seven when he was sentenced.
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. The three killings were connected by the .22 calibre cartridge cases recovered at the scenes. The attacks put shopkeepers across the borough on their guard for months. When he was arrested on November 20, 2012, four days after the last killing, the police said he had been planning to attack again.
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 rubbish bag.