BY JOHN MARZULLI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
She's one rough mama.
The matriarch of a mob-connected family charged with using their Italian restaurant in Queens to facilitate drug trafficking schooled her husband on the art of a beatdown, the feds said.
Brooklyn Federal Judge Sandra Townes ordered Eleonora Gigliotti held without bail Friday and appeared shocked by the woman’s chilling instructions.
In the secretly recorded phone call, Eleonora is allegedly discussing a planned assault on a relative who supposedly stole money from them.
“Hurting him in front of his kids, Grego, we’re going to look bad,” she allegedly said.
“Have someone grab him at night and he’ll learn.”
Then she allegedly added, “Bring him here and bang him up over here.”
The judge said she initially thought Eleonora was trying to dissuade her husband from violence.
“But as I read the transcript, she was actually advocating violence,” Townes said.
Townes overruled an earlier decision by a magistrate judge to release the 54-year-old woman on $4 million bail. Eleonora faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum of life, and the judge believed she may have been plotting to flee to Italy before her arrest.
The Gigliotttis and their son, Angelo, are charged with conspiring to import 55 kilos of cocaine from Costa Rica, concealed in containers of yucca.
They own the Cucino a Modo restaurant on 108th St. in Corona, and also have reputed ties to Genovese crime family figures and the ‘Ndrangheta organized crime group in Italy, according to court papers.
“Gotta be strong,” Eleonora Gigliotti said to family members in the courtroom as she was led out, giving them a thumbs-up sign.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicole Argentieri described the defendant as a sophisticated drug trafficker. “She is not a mule,” the prosecutor said, referring to a low-level smuggler of drugs.