By Selim Algar
A veteran mob rat was rewarded with a sentence of time served — just three days — for helping to whack his own brother-in-law despite pleas for punishment Thursday from his victim’s relatives.
Calling his cooperation “historic,” prosecutors said Gambino associate Anthony Ruggiano Jr., 61, helped the feds bag capos Bartolomeo “Bobby Glasses” Vernace and Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia with his insider testimony.
His singing on the stand against former family hit man Charles Carneglia also helped solve a slew of cold gangland cases, prosecutors said.
The son of late Gambino soldier Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano Sr., a busy triggerman who ran a crew out of an Ozone Park cafe, Ruggiano Jr. was sentenced for his role in the murder of his brother-in-law Frank Boccia in 1988.
The hit – sanctioned by Gambino don John Gotti – was in retaliation for Boccia’s ill-advised manhandling of Fat Andy’s wife after she refused to cough up cash for a baptism.
Boccia was lured to the old man’s wiseguy-filled social club, Cafe Liberty, where he was shot five times and then gutted to prevent his body from floating.
Groveling before the court, Ruggiano Jr. apologized to Boccia’s relatives as they seethed in the jury box during the proceeding.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for everything.”
A former junkie, Ruggiano Jr. said that he had cleaned up his life in the witness protection program and abandoned his life of crime.
“I was born and raised in a family whose values were rooted in organized crime,” he said. “I grew up in the shadow of my father.”
But the mobster’s tearful pleas were met with disgusted glares from Boccia’s daughter, Jenna, and sister, Josephine.
Unmoved by the fruits of his cooperation, the women focused on justice for their loved one.
“It is inconceivable how Mr. Ruggiano can live with himself,” Josephine Boccia told the court before sentencing, noting that her brother’s innards had been emptied and that his body was never found.
“It is the request of my family for the maximum penalty,” she said.
Just a baby when her father was murdered, Boccia’s daughter said the specter of his slaying has left her psychologically disfigured.
“The anger you have left with me is indescribable,” she told the hoodlum, adding that her heartbroken family told her for years that her dad was still alive and had abandoned them.
“I can’t tell you what that did to me as a child,” she said. “I pray today that justice prevails.”
But the pleas for punishment were mere formalities as Judge Jack Weinstein contritely explained that even the most nauseating cooperators were given breaks in the courtroom.
“In this case the defendant has become a tool of the government to destroy the remnants of this terrible group of the mafia that has been the cause of your grief,” he explained.
Aware of the outcome beforehand, the two women hung their heads and nodded as Weinstein expressed his sorrow for their loss.