By Selim Algar
More than 45 years after he was strangled with a dog chain by an infamous “Goodfellas” mobster, Paul Katz finally had his day in court — in a tiny cremation pouch clutched by his trembling daughter as she confronted the man who tried to hide her dad’s murder.
Struggling to keep her composure, Ilsa Katz brought the cremated remains into a Brooklyn federal courtroom, to tell off Bonanno wiseguy Jerome Asaro before a judge sent him to prison for 7 ¹/₂years.
“He said he had to go meet the guys at the candy store,” she recalled of the day in 1969 that her dad disappeared. “My mother begged him not to go. He never came back.”
Katz was an associate of James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke and Asaro’s father, Vincent Asaro, 79, a Bonanno capo who last year was charged in the $6 million 1978 Lufthansa air cargo heist at JFK airport that was masterminded by Burke and immortalized in the 1990 Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas.”
Burke and Vincent Asaro murdered Katz, the feds say, because the Irish mobster suspected he was cooperating with authorities.
“When they killed him they killed a family,” his daughter tearfully told Judge Allyne Ross. “They killed our future.”
The mobsters buried Katz under Burke’s Ozone Park, Queens home. But in the 1980’s, Jerome Asaro, now 56, on orders from his old man, dug up Katz’s remains and moved them.
The elder Asaro ordered the corpse disinterred after a dirty cop on Burke’s payroll told them officials were looking into Katz’s disappearance.
But Jerome was sloppy and on a tip, the feds in 2013 dug up Burke’s basement and recovered some remnants of Katz’s remains, which his family subsequently had cremated.
Jerome Asaro never said what he did with the remains he dug up.
In court Thursday, Katz’s s son, Lawrence, rejected Asaro’s grumbled expression of regret.
“I heard him apologize,” he said as Asaro looked on stone-faced. “He didn’t apologize to us. He apologized to his family.”
Not knowing if their father was dead or alive for more than 40 years had been torture, he said.
Katz’s loyal wife never remarried, and always held out hope that he would one day walk back through the front door.
“She would never remarry,” he said. “She always thought he would come home.”
Citing Asaro’s lengthy mob resume — which also included the torching of a Queens restaurant — Judge Allyne Ross slapped him with a 90-month term.
Asaro’s own father also doesn’t think much of him. Caught on a wiretap, he was heard saying: “F—–g Jerry is for Jerry. I lost my son when I made him a skipper. F—–g greedy c——-er. Got him a job. $600 a f—–g week. He didn’t do a f—–g thing.”