The elderly reputed Genovese mobster caught-on-camera slugging a New York City restauranteur was hauled off to jail Tuesday following his extortion conviction – despite pleas from his attorney that he’s too old to be behind bars.
Anthony “Rom” Romanello, 86, was cuffed and taken into custody in front of tearful family members inside a Brooklyn courtroom — less than 24 hours after a federal jury found him guilty of shaking down steakhouse owner Shuqeri “Bruno” Selimaj over an $86,000 gambling debt in 2017.
“His life expectancy is in the single digits,” Romanello’s lawyer, Jerry McMahon, had told the judge in a hail-Mary bid at keeping the alleged wiseguy out of jail until his March sentencing.
McMahon had to prove that Romanello — who faces up to 40 years in prison — had “exceptional circumstances” to avoid remand, which was mandatory based on his conviction because extortion is classified as a violent crime.
He tried to argue that Romanello, a reputed capo in the Genovese Crime Family, was so old and ailing he’d need to bring a “bag full of his pills” with him to jail to treat several health conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure and liver function problems.
When Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Eric Komitee asked if Romanello had any meaningful employment outside the Mafia crime family, McMahon said his client’s last job was unloading trucks at night in Maspeth, Queens in 1965.
“Respectfully, that’s quite a long time ago,” Brooklyn federal prosecutor Rebecca Schuman quipped, alleging that Romanello has been involved in organized crime for “more than a decade.”
The judge wasn’t buying McMahon’s argument, noting that Romanello had seemed to be in “good health for his age” during the weeklong trial.
“We’re talking about an active, lucid and highly mobile individual defendant,” Komitee said.
The judge also ordered co-defendant Joseph Celso — a reputed Genovese soldier who was convicted Monday of one of the two extortion counts — to also be remanded until his sentencing.
Celso’s attorney, Gerard Marrone, brought up his client’s health issues in an attempt to keep him out of jail for now, noting he’d had spinal surgery in May that caused a drop on his right foot, and recently had surgery to remove Thyroid cancer caused by his rescue efforts as a construction worker during the September 11 terror attacks.
Prosecutors argued Celso should join Romanello at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center because he couldn’t be trusted out in the community – especially since he attended a Genovese family Christmas party over the weekend, allegedly violating the conditions of his $1 million bond.
Celso, who was found not guilty of one count each of extortion and obstruction in the current case, was previously acquitted in a murder trial in 1993 after the main witness left the country.
He had been accused of the 1991 killing of Manuel Mayi, 19, a Dominican Republic native and Queens College honors student in engineering who was chased for 16 blocks before being beaten to death by a mob of nearly a dozen people after they allegedly saw him spraying graffiti in Corona.
Both accused mobsters are set to be sentenced by Komitee on March 4.
Mayi’s mother, Antagarica Mayi, a frequent observer at Romanello and Celso’s extortion trial, said she was still seeking justice in the decades-old cold case — but that she felt vindicated to see Celso in cuffs.
“Well, I feel a little bit more happy. I feel a little bit better,” Mayi said after Tuesday’s hearing.
“Because he paid a little bit for somebody else. He continued on the street and did something bad.”
