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Reputed 'capo' insists he isn't

In his opening statement, the alleged mobster says his trial is "an abomination."

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published October 19, 2006

"My hand to God, I don't deserve to be here," he told jurors. "This is an abomination."

He offered his own opening statement reluctantly, apologizing that his preferred attorney was stuck in an out-of-state trial. He asked jurors to bear with him.

Then he launched into a part-critical, part-philosophical reflection on the federal racketeering and extortion charges brought against him as an alleged "capo," or captain in the Gambino crime family.

All punctuated by hand gestures and his thick New York accent.

"I've been followed almost every day of my life by the FBI," he said. "I know them by first-name basis almost."

Agents played cards in his social club in Queens, N.Y., he said. They bugged his phones and lined up outside his two sons' weddings and his father's funeral to take pictures of people going in.

Federal prosecutors say Trucchio, 55, ran the drug trade in Queens and eventually came to oversee a string of crimes committed across two decades from New York to Miami. Though he was based in New York, prosecutors accuse him of leading a mob crew that ran a Tampa valet parking business and used threats and extortion to keep competitors out.

He already has been sentenced in South Florida to 20 years in prison for similar crimes.

But Trucchio denies involvement with the Gambinos, arguing his crimes stopped at gambling and some fights when he was younger. He said he had to fight twice as hard because of his deformed right arm, hurt in a hit-and-run accident at age 11.

"I paid my time for my crimes in New York," he said.

He acknowledged having known John Alite and John Gotti Jr., two affiliates of the Gambino crime family. But he said he came to view Alite as "a thug" and "a loose cannon" and kept his distance. Trucchio still made chit-chat in the streets, just enough to stay on Alite's good side.

"You gotta watch your back," he said. "You still say, 'hi, how you doin'?' "

The government is trying to paint him as the brain behind crimes such as murder, robbery, drug deals and extortion, he said.

"Don't let them lead you to believe that I'm that smart," he said. "Trust me, I'm not."

Trucchio, who read notes from the kind of yellow notebook paper allowed to jail inmates, criticized the people the government plans to use as witnesses against him and three other men on trial in Tampa for similar crimes. He described the witnesses as rapists, murderers and druggies, the kind of people who rob their own parents.

"And then when they got caught, they find God again," he said. "And their god is to rat for the government. They get paid for it."

When they are done testifying, the government releases these witnesses back into society, Trucchio claimed.

"If you smell a cesspool, make sure you check your neighbors," he warned. Federal prosecutors, he said, were "the real godfathers because they let everything slide."

He said the underworld described by prosecutors would make a good movie or TV script - "very impressive, for The Sopranos" - but didn't align with the world he had lived in. He said he didn't even know his co-defendants and reminded jurors that the New York authorities who followed him for years never charged him with mob-related activity.

"Why do you think the FBI in New York is going to give me a free pass?" he asked. "What, because I'm pretty?"

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at 813 226-3337 or cjenkins@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 19, 2006, 06:17:40]