Brad Hunter
Michael Meldish didn’t want to square up his gambling debt.
After all, the 63-year-old had his own violent crime group in the Big Apple — the Purple Gang.
Why should he?
According to the New York Daily News, Meldish and co. were freelance killers for the Lucchese, Genovese and Bonanno crime families.
His Purple Gang controlled the drug rackets in Harlem and the Bronx and ruled them with murder.
Cops suspected Meldish’s baby brother Joe, 56, iced at least 70 men in contract killings. He’s doing a 25 spot for a 1999 homicide.
Despite those tight ties to the mob, Meldish refused to pay his $100,000 debt to then acting Lucchese boss Matthew Madonna, 84.
He reportedly told the elderly crime boss: “F— off!”
“Not repaying a boss is a dangerous game,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Celia Cohen said. “Michael Meldish is dead because of these four men.”
The boss wanted Meldish taken off the board.
On Nov. 15, 2013, cops found Meldish dead in his car in Throg’s Neck. A bullet had been parked in his skull.
One witness told the court: “‘When I saw him up close he didn’t look drunk, he looked dead.”
Legendary NYPD mob detective Joe Coffey wasn’t going to be paying his respects to Meldish.
“Michael was a stone-cold killer,” Coffey told the News in 2013. “It should have happened a long time ago. I call it vermin killing vermin — poetic justice.”
On Friday, Madonna, Steven “Wonder Boy” Crea, Christopher Londonio and Terrence Caldwell were convicted in federal court of carrying out the Meldish hit.
The News reported that “Wonder Boy,” his underboss, helped Madonna come to the execution order.
And the call went down the pipeline.
Court heard that Meldish’s buddy, Londonio, set the gangster up for death and mob associate Caldwell was the triggerman. London drove the getaway car.
“The violent and disturbing acts of these four organized crime figures included the brutal murder of associate Michael Meldish. Fittingly, all four defendants have been found guilty of their heinous acts of fraud, extortion, and murder on the six-year anniversary of Meldish’s death,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said.
The four gangsters face spending the rest of their lives in prison for killing in aid of racketeering.
Londonio — at 350 lbs — bizarrely tried to escape from jail and went on a crash diet to slip through the bars.
It’s going to be a tougher squeeze now for the corpulent criminal.