Vincent Basciano, born in November 1959, rose through the Bonanno organized crime family of New York from associate to soldier to captain and, eventually, to acting boss. He held that position in the years after the official boss, Joseph Massino, was jailed, and he was tried three times in federal court in Brooklyn. A first jury in May 2006 convicted him of racketeering conspiracy but could not agree on a racketeering act concerning the death of Frank Santoro in early 2001. A second jury, on July 31, 2007, found every racketeering act charged against him proved, including that act. In May 2011 a third jury found him guilty of conspiracy to murder and of murder in aid of racketeering in the death of Randolph Pizzolo in Brooklyn on November 30, 2004.
The Pizzolo trial was a death penalty case. The Department of Justice had decided to seek a death sentence, the trial judge had asked it to reconsider, and prosecutors went ahead. On June 1, 2011, after less than two hours of deliberation, the jury declined to impose the death penalty. Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis then sentenced him to a second life term in July 2011. The case is also remembered for its principal witness: Massino, the first boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to testify for the government.
Court filings give Basciano's date of birth as November 14, 1959. The appeals court that later reviewed the racketeering charges described his path in the family as "an associate, as a soldier, as a captain, and, eventually, as acting boss." He once owned a hair salon in the Bronx.
The family's leadership had changed hands more than once. Massino, the official boss, was charged in January 2003 and convicted in July 2004 of racketeering, murder-related and other charges. While Massino was in custody, prosecutors said, Basciano rose to acting boss. Prosecutors later set out the line of succession as Massino, Anthony Urso, Basciano and then Michael Mancuso.
Federal prosecutors treated the family as a racketeering enterprise. The first indictment against Basciano, returned in 2003, charged racketeering. A superseding indictment on November 18, 2004 named him and Patrick DeFilippo, a Bonanno captain, together. Basciano was arrested the next day, November 19, 2004, and was held in custody from then on. Judge Garaufis presided over the Brooklyn trials.
The 2004 indictment, known in court as the S-5 indictment, charged racketeering conspiracy across the years from January 1979 through January 2005. The racketeering acts alleged against Basciano included gambling offenses, extortion, a conspiracy that caused or attempted to cause the death of a man between October and November 14, 1985, solicitation of the murder of another Bonanno member, and the death of Frank Santoro. A further set of acts, relating to a death in March 1999, was charged against DeFilippo within the same count. The government also charged a gambling count involving joker-poker machines, an extortion count and other offenses.
Frank Santoro died in the Bronx. Court filings place his death between January 1 and February 15, 2001. Prosecutors give the date as February 15, 2001, and say that it was ordered by Basciano, who was then a Bonanno soldier.
The charge against Basciano did not use the word "murder" in its wording. The racketeering act read: "Between January 1 and February 15, 2001, Basciano and others conspired to cause and caused the death of Frank Santoro." Two other Bonanno soldiers, Anthony Indelicato and Anthony Donato, later pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy and other charges and admitted involvement in the Santoro killing.
Randolph Pizzolo died in Brooklyn on November 30, 2004, eleven days after Basciano's arrest. Prosecutors alleged that Basciano had ordered the killing from federal custody, with Mancuso. Mancuso and a Bonanno soldier, Anthony Aiello, pleaded guilty and admitted their roles in it.
Basciano was not charged with the Pizzolo killing in either of the first two trials. The evidence of his alleged role was nevertheless admitted at those trials as evidence of other acts. His own charge came through a separate indictment.
On June 27, 2005, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI announced a superseding indictment in that case. It identified Basciano, then 45, as a Bonanno captain and acting boss, and it recorded that he was charged in connection with the murder of Randolph Pizzolo, together with Dominick Cicale, a Bonanno captain, and Aiello. It added two racketeering acts against Basciano: a conspiracy to murder DeFilippo, and "solicitation of the murder of a federal law enforcement official." Prosecutors stated that Basciano faced the possible penalty of life imprisonment or death because of the Pizzolo charge.
On November 2, 2005, further racketeering charges were filed against Cicale and Aiello and others. By the time of the 2011 trial, seven co-defendants in the Pizzolo case had pleaded guilty, leaving Basciano as the sole defendant.
The first trial, on the S-5 indictment, began in early 2006. Basciano and DeFilippo were tried together.
The jury returned its partial verdict on May 9, 2006. On Count One, racketeering conspiracy, it found Basciano guilty. It found proved the gambling acts, the attempted murder and conspiracy concerning the 1985 target, and the extortion conspiracy; it found other extortion acts not proved. It was not able to agree on the Santoro act, on the solicitation act concerning another Bonanno member, or on a separate count about the ownership and management of joker-poker machines. It found him not guilty on an extortion count concerning an unnamed victim. For DeFilippo, the jury convicted on the racketeering conspiracy count and gambling counts, acquitted on two counts of extortionate credit, and hung on the counts concerning the 1999 death.
On December 21, 2006, Judge Garaufis denied both defendants' motions for acquittal or a new trial. The Santoro act remained unresolved, and the government retried Basciano on it.
The retrial, on the S-8 indictment, ran through the summer of 2007. Its racketeering count covered the period from January 1979 through November 2004. The jury deliberated for about ten hours and, on July 31, 2007, returned guilty verdicts on all counts. The Second Circuit's later description of the verdict was that the jury "found all predicate acts proved," including the act concerning Santoro and the solicitation acts concerning the two other Bonanno members. It also convicted him on counts of joker-poker gambling, conspiracy to distribute marijuana, lottery gambling and sports-betting gambling.
On March 31, 2008, Judge Garaufis sentenced Basciano to life imprisonment for the crimes proved under the S-5 and S-8 indictments. The sentence has also been described as life without parole.
Basciano had meanwhile been charged again. The S-9 indictment in the Pizzolo case, returned on April 17, 2008, charged a racketeering count covering February 1997 through June 2005, conspiracy to murder Pizzolo in aid of racketeering, the murder of Pizzolo in aid of racketeering, which was a capital count, and a conspiracy to murder DeFilippo in aid of racketeering in 2003 and 2004. The racketeering count listed as one of its acts the solicitation of the murder of an unnamed federal law enforcement official.
Basciano argued that the S-9 charges repeated what he had already been tried for. The Second Circuit decided the question on March 23, 2010, in an opinion by Judge Reena Raggi. It held that the two conspiracies to murder in aid of racketeering, which carry different elements from the racketeering conspiracy of which he had already been convicted, were not the same offense, and it affirmed the refusal to dismiss them. It also held that the substantive racketeering count was barred by double jeopardy because the government had not shown that its pattern of racketeering was distinct from the earlier one, and it reversed and remanded with directions to dismiss that count. The Pizzolo murder count was not part of the challenge. The effect of the ruling was that the plot count involving a federal law enforcement official, which sat inside the racketeering count, did not go to trial.
An earlier appeal in the same period concerned Judge Garaufis himself. In 2008 Basciano asked the Second Circuit to order the judge to step aside from the capital case. The court denied that petition on June 11, 2008, and explained its reasons in an opinion dated September 17, 2008, holding that the judge had not abused his discretion in refusing to recuse.
The government's notice of intent to seek a death sentence listed statutory and non-statutory aggravating factors. Among those described in a defense filing of October 22, 2008 were substantial planning and premeditation, future dangerousness, obstruction of justice, participation in other uncharged serious crimes of violence and victim impact. In 2010 Attorney General Eric Holder directed that the government would continue to seek the death penalty. Judge Garaufis had earlier that year asked the Justice Department for what he called a "candid reappraisal" of that decision, and the case had by then cost taxpayers nearly $5 million. Prosecutors proceeded. The trial was scheduled for early 2011.
The government's case relied heavily on witnesses from inside the family. Massino, 68, who had been convicted in 2004 and began cooperating afterward, testified in April 2011. He had made recordings in 2005 of his conversations with Basciano, and they were played for the jury. Massino told jurors that Basciano had told him he killed the man whose death was charged. Other former Bonanno members who had become government witnesses also testified, among them Cicale. The defense challenged the credibility of the cooperating witnesses and argued that Basciano knew nothing about the killing.
Closing arguments were held on May 9, 2011, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Frank speaking for the government. Basciano was charged with capital murder and racketeering.
On May 16, 2011, after four days of deliberation, the jury found Basciano "guilty of murder, racketeering, conspiracy and other charges." The convictions concerned Randolph Pizzolo. The counts were conspiracy to murder and murder in aid of racketeering.
The same jury then heard the penalty phase, which began the following week. On June 1, 2011, in under two hours, it rejected the government's request for a death sentence, and the verdict sheet showed that it did not accept the prosecution's argument that Basciano posed a future threat.
On July 20, 2011, Judge Garaufis sentenced Basciano to a second life term, which was added to the life sentence he was already serving. In 2013 Judge Garaufis reduced Massino's own life sentence to the time he had served, about ten and a half years, with supervision for life.
Two further allegations ran alongside the Pizzolo case. As a racketeering act, the S-9 indictment charged that Basciano had solicited another person to cause the death of a federal law enforcement official, which the filings did not name. The Second Circuit's March 2010 ruling directed the dismissal of the racketeering count that contained it, and Basciano was not tried on it in 2011. In the recusal proceedings of 2008 the government alleged that Basciano had plotted to kill several people, among them the presiding judge and a federal prosecutor; Basciano disputed this, saying that a list of names was part of a religious ritual. No court found either allegation proved against him.
Basciano appealed the 2011 judgment to the Second Circuit, which affirmed it in December 2015. He asked for rehearing, which was denied on April 15, 2016, and the Supreme Court denied his petition for review on June 27, 2016. A second petition was denied on April 30, 2018.
In March 2018 the Second Circuit also ruled in a related matter, reversing a refusal by the district court to unseal documents from Basciano's trials that had been requested by Anthony Donato, who had pleaded guilty in 2008. In 2021 the court affirmed the denial of Donato's motion for compassionate release.
When the Supreme Court turned away his second petition in April 2018, Basciano was serving two life terms in federal custody.
The Basciano cases turned on how federal racketeering charges are built. The S-5 and S-8 indictments charged racketeering and racketeering conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c) and (d), in which murder, conspiracy and solicitation appear as racketeering acts alongside gambling and extortion. The S-9 indictment added counts under 18 U.S.C. § 1959, which covers conspiracy to murder, § 1959(a)(5), and murder, § 1959(a)(1), in aid of racketeering.
The Second Circuit's 2010 opinion separated the two kinds of charge. The § 1959(a)(5) conspiracies require different elements from the § 1962(d) racketeering conspiracy, so, under the Blockburger test, they were not the same offense as the one for which he had already been convicted. The new substantive racketeering count was different: the enterprise was conceded to be the same, and the government had not shown that its pattern was distinct, so double jeopardy barred it. In a later opinion the same court restated the principle drawn from the Basciano ruling, that "it is the pattern of activity, not the predicates, that is punished by a racketeering conviction," and that a broad pattern gives the government latitude while giving a defendant broad protection against later prosecution for conduct inside it.
The death penalty notice followed the federal capital statute. It named gateway factors under 18 U.S.C. § 3591(a)(2), statutory aggravating factors under § 3592(c) and non-statutory factors under § 3593(a)(2), among them future dangerousness. The jury declined to impose the penalty.
His lawyer told the jury that Basciano knew nothing about the Pizzolo killing and that the government's cooperating witnesses were not credible. The jury convicted him.
The solicitation of the murder of a federal law enforcement official was never put to a jury and is not a conviction. The allegation that a list of names included a judge and a prosecutor was likewise never tried.
No jury convicted him of a free-standing murder count concerning Santoro; the finding is a racketeering act within a racketeering conviction.
November 14, 1959: Vincent Basciano is born.
1985: Date range of the earliest racketeering act charged against him, a conspiracy concerning a man who survived.
January 1 to February 15, 2001: Period of the racketeering act concerning Frank Santoro.
July 30, 2004: Joseph Massino is convicted at a Brooklyn federal trial.
November 18-19, 2004: Superseding indictment (S-5); Basciano is arrested.
November 30, 2004: Randolph Pizzolo dies in Brooklyn.
June 27, 2005: Superseding indictment adds charges in the Pizzolo case.
May 9, 2006: First jury convicts him of racketeering conspiracy; Santoro act hung.
July 31, 2007: Second jury finds all racketeering acts proved, including the Santoro act.
March 31, 2008: Life sentence.
April 17, 2008: S-9 indictment returned.
March 23, 2010: Second Circuit rules on double jeopardy.
April 2011: Massino testifies.
May 16, 2011: Guilty verdict on the Pizzolo counts.
June 1, 2011: Jury declines to impose the death penalty.
July 20, 2011: Second life term.
December 23, 2015: Second Circuit decision on the appeal.
June 27, 2016: Supreme Court denies review.
April 30, 2018: Second petition denied.