Brooklyn Boro

Crooked pizza man gets 20 years in family-run international cocaine bust

June 22, 2017 By Paul Frangipane Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Mug shot of Angelo Gigliotti. Photo courtesy of the Eastern District of New York United States Attorney’s office.
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A Brooklyn Federal Judge sentenced a Queens man to 20 years in prison yesterday — after his parents were already sentenced — for taking part in a large-scale, family-run cocaine distribution ring operated out of a pizza shop.

Angelo Gigliotti walked out into Judge Raymond Dearie’s courtroom at Brooklyn Federal Court and smiled at his family and friends who filled three rows in the audience. Gigliotti’s wife Brooke was audibly sobbing as she saw her husband about to be sentenced.  

Gigliotti, 36, was convicted in a two-week trial in January 2016 with his father Gregorio Gigliotti for smuggling two shipments containing more than $1 million worth of cocaine from Costa Rica to their Corona, Queens pizzeria, hidden in the flaps of shipments of cassava, a plant similar to yucca.

Federal wiretaps showed the family, which included Angelo Gigliotti’s mother Eleonora, transported 120 kilos (265 pounds) of cocaine through their pizza shop Cucino a Modo Mio since 2012.

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The feds seized five pistols, two revolvers, one shotgun, ammunition and more than $100,000 cash in the family’s possession.

Google currently shows the family shop to be “permanently closed.”

“It’s hard to be sympathetic towards you,” Dearie told Angelo Gigliotti before sentencing him. “But on a human level, I don’t like sentencing anyone to 20 years.”

Angelo Gigliotti’s cocaine distribution charge yielded a mandatory minimum of 20 years with a maximum term of life in prison.

Gigliotti’s mother Eleonora was sentenced to seven years in prison on May 11 after she pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

Court records show her delivering a payment to Costa Rica on at least one instance in exchange for the shipments that were delivered to the family-owned Bronx warehouse Fresh Farm Export Corporation.

Angelo Gigliotti’s father and head of the business Gregorio was sentenced to 18 years in April.

When Gigliotti’s attorney Gerald McMahon argued for a lesser term, he asked the judge, who sentenced Gigliotti’s parents, to consider the entire family.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Keith Edelman used Gigliotti’s two prior felony convictions in his argument for at least the mandatory 20 years.

Gigliotti got five years’ probation for a 2001 gang assault and then got busted for intent to distribute 100 kilos (220 pounds) of marijuana before he landed in the cocaine family business.

Dearie showed sympathy towards Angelo Gigliotti, speaking of his family support.

“You’ve got to turn around from this fast-track life,” Dearie said. “The people in the back … deserve it.”

McMahon urged Gigliotti to keep fighting, keep learning and keep hoping in prison.

Gigliotti blew a kiss to his family and crying wife before he was escorted out of the courtroom.

 


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