Long Island cop allegedly on mob payroll staged fake raid that didn't fool illicit gamblers: ‘These are not real police'
The Nassau County cop who allegedly worked for the Bonanno crime family bungled a raid on a rival family's gambling den so badly that it totally failed to fool the victimized gangsters — including a gambler named 'Mario the Landscaper,' who quickly said, 'These are not real police,' a court heard Wednesday.
'It wasn't professionally done — you could see it was fake,' mobster Sal Russo testified Wednesday at ex-officer Hector Rosario's trial for obstruction and serving as a soldier for the Bonannos in their struggles against the rival Genovese crime family.
'I just heard yelling and screaming, 'This is the police! This is the police!'' Russo testified about the shocking raid. 'They broke the screens on one of the machines, and they kept screaming, 'This police! This police!' before they left the store.'
But the fake sortie — which targeted Salvatore 'Sal the Shoemaker' Rubino's illegal casino inside his Merrick store, Sal's Shoe Repair — was so shoddily done that none of the illicit gamblers thought Rosario and his small crew actually cops.
'These are not real police,' Mario the Landscaper, who Russo described as a 'steady player at Sal's,' allegedly told the others after the initial shock wore off.
'They don't just come in breaking [things],' Russo said, quoting Mario.
Russo testified that the low budget raid by Rosario — who was only being paid $1,500-a-month by the Mafia — looked so fake he feared he might get clipped by the Genovese bosses in retaliation.
When asked what he thought might happen to him, Russo answered, 'Hospital, cemetery … anything.'
The b-grade raid on the gambling den wasn't the only bungling by the alleged dumb-fella.
At a later point, Rosario tried to play like a movie Mafioso and talk to Russo about a pot growing operation in a code that involved a movie he saw in Netflix.
'When I get the name of the movie, try to watch it. It's good,' Rosario said in a recording of the phone call played in court.
Russo, however, said he had no idea what the cop was talking about and thought he was really just calling to talk about film.
'I thought he was talking about a movie,' he said.
Rosario, a 51-year-old former detective, conspired to target rival Genovese mafiosos in a feud that erupted after the Cosa Nostra families struck a rare agreement to split the profits of a gelato shop's backroom gambling den, federal prosecutors said.
But the shaky peace deal didn't last — and Rosario 'sold himself' to the Bonnanos before staging the faux raid, Brooklyn prosecutors have said.
Rosario, who was first busted in 2022 and released on a $500,000 bond, was allegedly put on the payroll by two Bonanno family members and told to target Rubino's betting parlor in 2013 or 2014.
Rosario has been charged with obstructing a grand jury probe into racketeering and lying to the FBI.
On the trial's opening day, prosecutors introduced the jurors to a laundry list of alleged mobsters and mapped out a constellation of illegal gambling operations — which led to a sweeping 2022 bust that rounded up eight alleged mobsters and Rosario.
'He chose the crime family over the public he swore to protect,' Anna Karamigios, assistant US attorney for the Eastern District, told jurors in Brooklyn federal court.
Yet despite his criminal allegiance, Rosario doesn't appear to have been a cunning ally.
Still, Rosario took home $2,500 after the second-rate raid, and launched three others aimed at different backroom casinos run by Genovese and Gambinos gangsters — including one at the Gran Caffe Gelateria in Lynbrook, Russo said.
But they didn't work out.
Rosario would flash his badge at the camera, the mobster said from the stand. But they would never buzz him in to let him raid the joints.
Still, the Bonannos paid him about $8,000 in total for his escapades, which Russo hoped would prompt the closure of Gran Caffe and push the Bonannos to set up a gambling spot at his Soccer Club in Valley Stream.
'If Gran Caffe closed, I would put [Rosario] on the payroll at soccer club,' Russo said, adding Russo would have made about $1,500 weekly.
The plan never came to fruition, however.
The jury also heard a series of seven wiretapped conversations between Russo and Rosario — including one in which Russo told the crooked cop he wanted him to stage another fake raid to 'rob Mexicans' who were dealing heroin.
Rosario agreed — and would have taken home $50,000 in payment.
But the raid never happened.
In another recording, Russo tried to get Rosario to move his weed stash to a buyer.
Rosario pushed back, however, and claimed the feds were watching him.
'They got you by the balls, bro,' Rosario said. 'They're watching you, they're watching you. They're just waiting for you to f–k up again.'
'You scratch your ass? They're watching you,' he said. 'They're waiting for you to s–t.'
The two never ended up selling the marijuana.
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Time Magazine
4 hours ago
- Time Magazine
The Problem With 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox'
In a notorious video that circulated around the globe, 20-year-old exchange student Amanda Knox is kissing her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Out of context, it looks like banal, sun-dappled vacation footage—American girl goes to picturesque Perugia, falls for scarf-wearing Italian boy. In fact, the couple had just learned, after an eerie morning at the apartment Knox shared with three other young women, that police had found her roommate Meredith Kercher brutally murdered in Kercher's bedroom. The kiss became a key piece of a prosecutorial propaganda campaign, giddily inflamed by the tabloid media, that framed Knox as a perverse, cold-blooded killer. You only have to keep watching for a few more seconds, as the lovers turn away from one another, to catch the look of pain and confusion on her face and realize she's not celebrating. The moment is recreated in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a true crime drama that traces the since-exonerated Knox's Kafkaesque ordeal in an Italian justice system that tarred her as a psycho sex fiend who masterminded Kercher's rape and murder. What's strange, considering that Knox, her husband Chris Robinson, and public-shaming expert Monica Lewinsky are among the series' executive producers, is how much more ambiguous the kiss looks in this telling. When Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox, turns to face the camera, her expression is wide-eyed and inscrutable. Twisted is otherwise overwhelmingly sympathetic to its protagonist, and Van Patten (Nine Perfect Strangers, Tell Me Lies) does an admirable job with limited material. Yet the fumbling of this scene captures what is so frustrating about the show. For all its fidelity to the complicated facts of one of this century's most infamous murder cases, Twisted fails to deliver the one element of Knox's story that might be best expressed through scripted drama: insight into who its viciously caricatured, widely misunderstood subject really is. The eight-part series, helmed by showrunner K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us), often plays like an extended version of the broad reenactments you see in crime docs. In a way, this makes sense. There is much to reenact, to explain and unravel and contextualize, in a legal saga that began on Nov. 2, 2007, the morning Kercher's body was discovered, and had yet to be fully resolved as late as this year. Italy's justice system differs greatly from its American counterpart; prosecutors lead police investigations, criminal and civil trials can be consolidated into the same proceedings, juries in even the highest-profile cases are unsequestered. From paparazzi photos to footage recorded at the scene by the forensics team to TV news reports to interviews with Knox, plenty of imagery exists from throughout this story—much of which already appeared in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox before being restaged, shot-for-shot, in Twisted. Following a flash-forward to Amanda's return to Italy in 2022, during which she spends a tense car ride hiding under a blanket from local media ravenous for a glimpse of its favorite villain, the tale unfolds in mostly chronological order. We watch an ingenuous Amanda skip around Perugia, in the fall of 2007, living out a study-abroad fairytale with her new boyfriend, Raffaele (Giuseppe De Domenico, heartbreaking), and three female roommates, including Meredith (Rhianne Barreto), a British student. About 10 minutes into the premiere, the dream sours. Amanda returns to her adorable apartment to shower after a night at Raffa's but slowly realizes something isn't right. There are blood stains in the bathroom, a revolting mess in the toilet. Meredith's door is locked, and no one answers when Amanda calls out to her. Soon after the body is found, the young couple become crucial witnesses in the police investigation, detained at the station for days' worth of questioning. Bilingual scripts effectively demonstrate how the language barrier exacerbated Knox's predicament, as she was far from fluent in Italian at the time and often lacked an adequate translator. It is (almost cartoonishly) clear from the outset that Amanda has rubbed the investigators the wrong way. They don't like the kiss, or her sexual candor, or the vibrator that was found among her toiletries; their prejudices are reinforced when Meredith's British friends express their own dislike for Amanda. A pair of nightmarish, physically and psychologically violent marathon interrogations ends with Raffaele manipulated into destroying her alibi and a disoriented Amanda implicating Patrick Lumumba (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), the proprietor of the bar where she worked, in the murder. (Though she almost immediately recanted this accusation, Lumumba was arrested, then quickly cleared, and a slander charge was added to list of crimes for which she'd face trial.) The middle half of the series wades, somewhat laboriously, through years of legal wrangling and incarceration, as Amanda and Raffaele are found guilty and serve four years of their sentences before seeing their convictions overturned due to an astonishing absence of reliable physical evidence. The arrival in Italy of Amanda's fiercely loyal mother, Edda Mellas (the usually great Sharon Horgan, struggling with an American accent), should raise the emotional stakes, but, as is the case with so much of the show's dialogue, the women mostly speak in gloomy exposition. Richer and more thoughtfully depicted is the relationship that Amanda, an avowed atheist, develops with Don Saulo Scarabattoli (Alfredo Pea), the prison's open-minded, in-house priest. The advice he gives her when she's on the verge of yielding to despair over what could become a life sentence—"You can serve humanity even if it doesn't serve you'—will shape her future. Knox and Lewinsky have talked about how they insisted on ending Twisted not with Amanda and Raffaele's first acquittal, on appeal in 2011, but with a pair of episodes that trace the case's aftermath: the bumpy reacclimation to freedom, the permanent reputational damage, the search for purpose in a life derailed, the ongoing legal woes and media circus. The instinct to move beyond the true crime template, avoiding a false happily-ever-after ending, is a good one. But as executed, the penultimate episode just feels like more trudging from point to point on a timeline of well-documented events. Amanda endures an aggressive interview with Chris Cuomo (Josh Burdett): Check. Amanda finds community with other exonerees: Check. The finale—which is, unfortunately, the only episode co-written by Knox—goes deeper. We see Amanda, now an author, wife, and mother, compare battle scars with Raffaele and confront the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who, despite the early emergence of airtight forensic evidence implicating the third person convicted of Kercher's murder, perpetrated the character assassination that led to her imprisonment. It's in this coda that the series finally feels like it's about something other than the obvious fact that Knox suffered a grave injustice. We discover that, just as Amanda is not the sex-crazed monster Mignini created, Mignini is not the bloodthirsty misogynist her allies imagined; he's a man tortured by personal demons. Everyone is more complicated than tabloid headlines make them out to be. (Knox took this argument to an extreme in a recent Atlantic essay that called the common description of University of Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger as, simply, evil 'an excuse to stop thinking, to ignore the evidence, to hate and punish someone law enforcement didn't, or wouldn't, understand.') This perspective tempers the hysteria of an earlier episode, which opens with a mini-biography narrated by Mignini that races from a childhood steeped in the Madonna-whore complex to his father's untimely death ('You're the man of the house now,' the boy is told, graveside, in an egregiously canned bit of dialogue) to the debacle that was his involvement in the Monster of Florence serial killer case. The Italian-stereotype quotient is high in this rendering, as it also is in another episode's more empathetic portrait of Raffaele. Perhaps out of respect for the privacy of the real people or their families, we barely spend any time with Meredith or Patrick—another innocent victim, whose experience as a Black, Congolese immigrant feels under-acknowledged in a story so concerned with Amanda's gendered shaming. But Raffa, a sweet, inexperienced romantic hoping for another shot at love with a woman he adores, comes through clearly. I left the series feeling as if I knew him much better than I knew Amanda, even though she gets far more screen time than any other character and Van Patten narrates most of the episodes. (These voiceovers can get pretty purple: 'Telling my tale is a sticky, tricky thing—especially when I was a stranger to my story's true beginning.') This is not for lack of discussion about her personality. She is described, variously, as quirky, impassive, naive, vulgar, blithely optimistic. 'Everyone says I'm like Amélie'—the eponymous gamine from the movie she and Raffaele watched the night of Meredith's murder—'because I'm a weirdo,' Amanda says at one point. Edda calls her 'sunny despite everything.' One of Meredith's friends testifies that the defendant struck her as 'cold,' 'unfeeling,' and 'quite open about her sex life.' It's fine that none of these contradictory characterizations bear much resemblance to the Amanda we observe. This is, after all, the story of a woman who was misread by a significant chunk of Earth's population. But The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox should have a compelling counternarrative to offer about Amanda Knox. To the extent that she's defined, it's in terms of what she self-evidently is not—not a killer, not a sex freak, not a callous American femme fatale. With ample evidence of Knox's innocence available for over a decade, Steinberg and her writers had the chance to do something more than mount yet another defense. They could've made us understand Amanda's thinking in the most awkward and insensitive-seeming moments of her trial by media. Instead, the show tends to replay these gaffes without adding much new perspective. Amanda's alleged weirdness is mentioned more than it's explored; how much could we have learned about her if Steinberg hadn't rushed through a scene set at her time-traveler-themed wedding? A flashback episode that gave us more time with Amanda before Meredith's death might also have helped. Some of the best crime docudramas, like Hulu's own The Dropout and The Girl From Plainville, thrive on nuanced portraiture of real women whose mass-media villain edits contain far more truth than 'Foxy Knoxy.' Without powerful insight into a person who is also Twisted's executive producer—and who has drawn more perceptive conclusions from her ordeal in two memoirs, multiple podcasts, and the Netflix doc—it's hard to justify the reopening of 18-year-old wounds.
Elle
7 hours ago
- Elle
Amanda Knox: 'I Am Not My Reputation. But I Am Reclaiming It.‘
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. For most of my adult life, I've had a doppelgänger. Not a flesh-and-blood one, but a cartoon version of me named 'Foxy Knoxy.' In 2007, I was a sheltered 22-year-old studying abroad in Italy when I was falsely accused of murdering my roommate, Meredith Kercher. In the absence of any credible evidence tying me to the crime, the Italian prosecutor conjured up this femme fatale to justify throwing me in prison. She was seductive, cunning, duplicitous—and she had my face. The media amplified this character, deploying her in the public imagination for profit. She didn't just live in the courtroom and the headlines; she was in the minds of jurors and strangers around the world. Foxy Knoxy was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison, but it was me, Amanda Knox, who had to live in that prison cell. After I was acquitted on appeal in 2011 and returned to 'freedom,' I knew that everyone I would ever meet from then on would have already encountered my doppelgänger. I saw it when people looked at me with an awkward, probing eye, from grocery clerks to old acquaintances from school. It was like Foxy Knoxy had just left the room before I entered, leaving behind a charged atmosphere. She limited my career opportunities, my romantic life, my social world. No matter how affirmatively I tried to reveal the real me—writing my 2013 memoir, Waiting to Be Heard, taking part in a 2016 Netflix documentary about the case—Foxy Knoxy stubbornly refused to disappear. The hate directed at her continued to find its way into my inbox. When my daughter was born in 2021, I received messages wishing that she'd be murdered. Over time, I learned to accept that I would never be able to rid myself of Foxy Knoxy, and that my reputation, as much as it feels like it's mine, does not truly belong to me. I've written about this insight in my new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, and I've reflected on it in a series of lectures called Resilience on the Waking Up app. Over the years, I've come to understand something that's true for all of us, but was made glaringly obvious to me: Our public identities live in the commons. They can be shaped, distorted, demolished, or celebrated by others. And if you're not careful, you can start mistaking your reflection in the eyes of the public for who you really are. For a long time, I made that mistake. I fought tooth and nail to distance myself from 'the girl accused of murder.' I thought if I could just set the record straight, convince the world of my innocence, I would be seen for who I really am. But here's the brutal truth: I will always be associated with the murder of my roommate, more so than her actual killer, Rudy Guede, who is now out of prison and facing trial for another sexual assault. I've made peace with that. I've accepted that many people will remain allured and horrified by the specter of Foxy Knoxy. This peace I feel now comes from realizing that whatever the public may think of me, I am so much more than their opinions and judgments. I'm a mom. A wife. A writer. A podcaster. A comedian. An activist. And now, a television producer. On August 20, the limited series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox premieres on Hulu, and with it, a new doppelgänger is born. Her name is Grace Van Patten, and she plays me at 20, naive and bewildered—and me at 35, a haunted and determined mom venturing back to Italy to confront the man who threw me in prison. Grace is supremely talented, and watching her embody me on screen is both eerie and beautiful. She brings her own vulnerability, empathy, and intelligence to the role. In doing so, she adds yet another layer to the ever-evolving public imagination of who 'Amanda Knox' is. And for the first time, that evolving image doesn't feel like exploitation or betrayal. It feels like a collaboration. Because this time, I was behind the scenes. As an executive producer, I made decisions along with the creator and showrunner, KJ Steinberg, and my fellow EPs, including Monica Lewinsky and Warren Littlefield, during every step of the creative process, from casting, to giving notes on scripts, to helping the geniuses in set design and costuming get things just right, to co-writing the final episode with KJ. The whole endeavor has been an incredibly gratifying experience, because there are hundreds of very talented people working tirelessly, some of them for years, to tell my story in a thoughtful and artistic fashion. And they're doing it in alignment with my values: Everything is nuanced, there are no black-and-white narratives, no mustache-twirling villains, just flawed and complicated humans. I have come to tears multiple times thinking about the care and respect all these people have shown to me, and to the memory of Meredith Kercher, in making this show. It reminds me that identity is always co-created. It lives in the space between how we see ourselves and how we're seen. That's why The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox feels like a turning point for me. I finally get to confront my doppelgänger face-to-face—not to defend myself, but to explore the full, messy, human complexity of what I went through and to give the benefit of the doubt even to the people who vilified me. And I think that says more about who I am than their accusations ever could. Because let's not pretend that reputation doesn't matter—it does. What people think of you, or about you, determines what doors open for you and who takes you seriously. It affects your possibilities in life, the same way your bank balance does. But hinging your sense of self worth on your finances is just as much a recipe for suffering as hinging it on your reputation, which, as I know, can be wiped out in an instant. You are not your net worth. I am not my Google search results. Detachment hasn't come easily to me. I've had to learn it the hard way. Through years of speaking my truth and watching people hear it, or refuse to. There's a kind of Zen paradox at play: It may feel vital to tell your story, but it's also vital not to become your story. Be the teller, not the tale. Reclaiming your narrative may mean standing on a stage and telling your story to an audience. It could mean producing a television show about your life. Sometimes it means tucking your daughter into bed and realizing that she sees you not as a symbol, but simply as mom. That's the version of me that matters most. But I'm proud of this other version, too—the one you see on your screen. Because she's not a cartoon anymore. She's a woman who survived, and who's still growing. Which is to say, this isn't the last time I'll tell my story, because my story isn't over. And neither is yours. We're all evolving. We're all more than the worst thing that's ever happened to us—or that has been said about us. The challenge is to hold that truth in your heart, even when the world refuses to.
Fox News
9 hours ago
- Fox News
Cowboys legend Michael Irvin reveals details of cocaine arrest
Dallas Cowboys legendary wide receiver Michael Irvin opened up about an incident where he was arrested for cocaine possession in the prime years of the team's 1990s dynasty. During the seventh episode of the Netflix docuseries "America's Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys," Irvin spoke about the March 1996 incident that saw him arrested and eventually tried for cocaine possession. It came just one month after the team won its third Super Bowl in a four-year span, as Irvin had cemented himself as a league superstar and future Hall of Famer. "I had a routine, after you win the Super Bowl, before the next season starts, you get about a month, and that month you cut loose and have a good time," Irvin said of the incident that occurred just before his March 5 birthday. The documentary showed that, on March 4, 1996, police found Irvin, his former Cowboys teammate Alfredo Roberts and two females in a Texas hotel room with drug paraphernalia, sex toys, marijuana and cocaine. A hidden camera video showed Irvin discussing doing cocaine while in the passenger seat of car. Irvin faced potentially 20 years in prison. But he ultimately pleaded no contest to felony cocaine possession in exchange for four years of deferred probation, a $10,000 fine and dismissal of misdemeanor marijuana possession charges. He was also suspended the first five games of the 1996 season. Still, the incident resulted in a difficult conversation with his wife, Sandy Harrell. "My wife, she looked at me and she said, 'Don't say a word, God has already told me I am your wife and I am not going anywhere. But you have to make your peace with God,'" Irvin said in the documentary. "I don't think I ever felt worse in my life."
