By Santul Nerkar
The assignment carried a lot of risk and not much reward.
The Long Island detective would try to shut down illegal gambling operations run out of backrooms in a shoe repair store, a cafe and a chess club. The work netted him around $8,000. But his employer wasn’t the police: It was the Bonanno crime family, which paid him to target the franchises of rival families.
On Wednesday, the risk was realized. A federal jury in Brooklyn found the former Nassau County detective, Hector Rosario, 51, guilty of lying to authorities about his knowledge of the illegal gambling scheme. The jurors acquitted him on a charge of obstructing justice.
John J. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement that Rosario had eroded trust in law enforcement.
“This corrupt detective chose to prove his loyalty to an organized crime family over the public he was sworn to protect,” Durham said.
Rosario, who wore a blue suit and orange tie, did not change expression as the forewoman read the verdict. When asked for a comment after the trial, Rosario said only, “in the future.”
Rosario faces up to five years in prison when Judge Eric N. Vitaliano sentences him. Rosario, who remains out on bail, would have faced an additional 20 years had he been convicted of obstructing justice. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
“We’re glad that the jury acquitted on the obstruction, and it’s a relief that they did,” said Lou Freeman, a lawyer for Rosario. Freeman said he planned to appeal Rosario’s conviction for lying to the FBI.
In 2022, prosecutors for the Eastern District indicted Rosario and eight members and associates of the Bonanno and Genovese crime families after a yearslong investigation into racketeering and illegal gambling on Long Island. Rosario, who was fired by the Nassau County Police Department shortly after the indictment, was the only defendant who did not accept a plea deal and whose case went to trial.
Rosario, prosecutors said, was a loyal enforcer of the Bonanno family’s business directives, chief among them a push to quash the competition: illegal gambling operations run by rival families. Key witness testimony helped support the prosecutors’ argument that Rosario had lied about having no knowledge of the illegal gambling activities or of certain people and venues involved in the scheme.
The trial embodied the diminished power of organized crime families in the region. Beginning in the 1980s and ’90s, prosecutors in the Eastern District decimated the five major families — Bonanno, Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese and Colombo — with cases against their leaders. Now, where the families once made their money by dominating large unions and industries in the Northeast, they dabble in smaller criminal ventures.
The district’s prosecutors described this illegal gambling scheme as lucrative, with profits from one establishment often exceeding $10,000 per week, but Rosario’s cut was meager. And the setting of the illegal activities — card tables and a handful of computerized gambling machines squirreled away in the back of small businesses — was a far cry from the Mafia of yesteryear.
During the weeklong trial, prosecutors focused on Rosario’s involvement with the Mafia to build their case that he had lied to federal investigators to protect the Bonannos.
They played recordings of Rosario speaking with mob figures, propped up posters that depicted family trees of the different crime families and displayed payment ledgers to show the jury the seedy Long Island underworld that Rosario had entered. They called on Mafia members and law enforcement officials to illustrate his protection of the Bonanno family.
According to prosecutors, the Bonanno and Genovese families agreed to share profits from illegal gambling at the Gran Caffe, a gelato shop in Lynnbrook, on Long Island, following a bitter dispute. But the Bonannos still weren’t happy with the arrangement, and believed the Genovese family was eating into their profits.
Salvatore Russo, a Bonanno associate, devised a plan for Rosario to launch a fake police raid on Sal’s Shoe Repair, which was run by the Genovese family in the nearby town of Merrick. On a chilly spring night in 2013, Rosario and two associates, in police jackets and with badges dangling from their necks, drove in a white van to the shoe store and barged in, according to witnesses.
Rosario directed one of his colleagues to destroy a gambling machine — which he did by smashing it with a flashlight — but did not seize any items from the store.
The store’s owner and namesake, Sal Rubino, testified that he had seen Rosario burst in. Rubino, also known as Sal the Shoemaker, said “something was not right” when Rosario did not confiscate anything, ask for identification or leave in a squad car.
“They weren’t real police that night,” said Sean Sherman, an assistant U.S. attorney.
Then there was Damiano Zummo, a soldier for the Bonanno family who testified against Rosario after he and Russo were charged with selling cocaine out of a gelato store in 2017. Zummo described under oath how he had been initiated into the crime family, pricking his finger and dripping blood onto a picture of a saint.
The plan was for Rosario to “go in there, to Sal’s Shoe Repair, and just intimidate them in the hopes that it would close down,” Zummo testified.
The charges that Rosario lied centered around an FBI interview on the morning of Jan. 27, 2020. That day, at around 7:30 a.m., agents knocked on the door of his apartment in Mineola, New York. Speaking in the hallway outside his apartment, Rosario denied any knowledge of the families’ illegal gambling ventures, including the one at Sal’s Shoe Repair, according to testimony from an agent.
Prosecutors presented other evidence during the trial that suggested that Rosario had protected the Bonanno crime family. They played recordings of conversations between Rosario and Russo, including one in which Rosario warned Russo about being surveilled by authorities. Zummo testified that Rosario had showed up at his house to warn him that he was under investigation.
Rosario’s lawyers repeatedly argued to the jury that it could not trust the government’s star witnesses, who had been on the mob’s payroll.
“You cannot convict our client on the word of three convicted members of the Mafia,” Kestine Thiele, an attorney for Rosario, said during closing arguments Monday.
The jurors deliberated for more than nine hours over two days, and they submitted notes to the court that suggested skepticism. In particular, the jurors seemed conflicted about whether Rosario had interfered with a grand jury investigation; Thiele had argued that Rosario had not even not known about any such investigation.
More people testified about Rosario’s attempts to quash the Bonanno family’s competition. John Clinton, a Nassau County detective, testified that in 2014, Rosario told him that he knew about crimes by the Genovese and Gambino families. But when Clinton pressed him, Rosario didn’t offer details.
Rosario conducted other raids but didn’t find much success. Russo, who said that he was in charge of paying Rosario, testified that he had paid Rosario up to $8,000 for the visits.
But that sum stood to increase when Rosario showed up to close the Gran Caffe. Russo had promised Rosario a weekly salary of between $1,000 and $1,500 if he succeeded in shutting down the shop and a competing store started making more money.
The Gran Caffe stayed open, however, and Rosario received just a single payment of $500.
