The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York last week heaped praise on the Queens District Attorney’s Office for its work which helped federal authorities arrest an alleged mob associate who has been indicted on, among other charges, the 2002 murder of an illicit business partner in Howard Beach.
AUSA Loretta Lynch thanked DA Richard Brown and his staff for its “outstanding assistance” with the case against Gennaro “Jerry” Bruno, a reputed associate of the Gambino crime family, who was nabbed last week in Las Vegas on charges of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy, narcotics trafficking, extortion, obstruction of justice, and the murder of Martin Bosshart, 30, on 155th Avenue near Lahn Street.
Bosshart, according the U.S. Attorney’s Office, was a “criminal associate” of Bruno’s who at the time of his death had begun efforts to exclude one of Bruno’s coconspirators from a lucrative marijuana importation operation. On Jan. 2, 2002, Bruno and other members of his crew, according to the indictment, lured Bosshart to 155th Avenue just off the Belt Parkway, where Bruno allegedly pumped a single shot at point-blank range into the back of Bosshart’s head, killing him instantly. His body was recovered at the scene.
“I was at the crime scene that night and saw firsthand that this was a deliberate and calculated execution of the deceased individual,” Brown said on Friday. “While it has taken more than a dozen years to bring the alleged triggerman to justice, I congratulate our federal law enforcement colleagues for their perseverance, commitment and hard work in ensuring that justice delayed is not justice denied.”
According to Lynch, Bruno evaded justice for years and conspired with other Gambino associates to obstruct an official grand jury proceeding into the Bosshart murder, while continuing to participate in the core money-making activities of the Gambino crime family, including drug trafficking and extortion.
A spokesman for Brown told The Forum this week that the DA’s office “supplied some information that had to do with the extortion part of the crime that [Bruno] was charged with.” In 2003, Bruno, formerly of Ozone Park, pleaded guilty to second-degree grand larceny, admitting that he was an enforcer for an illegal carting company that ran a multi-million-dollar trade waste fraud scheme involving bribery of key employees and cheating of several entities out of thousands of dollars in waste collection charges and threats of physical harm to competitors.
According to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bruno “is currently in custody and is being transported by [U.S.] Marshals. We have not set a court date as of yet, and will not be able to until he arrives in [the Eastern District of New York].”