Nassau Mafia Member Gets Prison Term For Racketeering, Extortion

SYOSSET, NY — A Syosset mafia member has been sentenced to four years in prison after being convicted in federal court of plotting extortion and racketeering crimes with the Genovese crime family of La Cosa Nostra, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

Frank Giovinco, 53, was convicted by a jury in December of acts involving extortion, honest services fraud and unlawful kickback payments related to the family's control of two local labor union chapters, authorities said. He was sentenced Monday to prison and serve three years of supervised release.

"For years, Frank Giovinco, as a member of the Genovese Crime Family, instilled fear in victims and perpetrated kickback schemes to tighten the Family’s stranglehold over two labor unions," Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a news release. "For committing these crimes, Giovinco will now spend four years in prison."

Giovinco was a member of the Genovese crime family who "instilled fear in victims and propagated kickback schemes" to strengthen the family's stranglehold over two labor unions, federal prosecutors said. La Cosa Nostra, also known as the "Mob" or the "Mafia," operates through entities known as "families." The largest of the families operating in the New York City area is the Genovese crime family, which inserted Giovinco in the early 1990s into a scheme to control the waste-carting industry, authorities said.

In recent years and continuing until 2017, Giovinco plotted with other members and associates of the family to commit an array of crimes, prosecutors said. Giovinco's activity centered on two local chapters of a labor union. He participated in schemes designed to manipulate and siphon money from the unions to benefit the family, authorities said.

Among his crimes: Giovinco extorted a financial adviser and a labor union official in exchange for a cut of commissions made from union investments. He was recorded planning to "rattle the cage" of one victim and have another victim's "feet held to the fire," prosecutors said. When the union official didn't pay the family commissions, Giovinco and others threatened him.

Furthermore, Giovinco planned to profit from union investments by paying kickbacks to the union official and others in exchange for a cut of future commissions. Giovinco also participated in a long-running extortion of a union president for yearly tribute payments of more than $10,000, and sought a job at the union to exert control over the union official on the family's behalf, and threatened to replace the union official.

This isn't the first time Giovinco has found himself in prison.

In 1997, Giovinco, the former head of the Greater New York Waste Paper Association, pleaded guilty to New York state charges of attempted enterprise corruption and agreed to serve 3 1/2 to 10 1/2 years in prison.

In that case, prosecutors at the time said a Mafia cartel controlled New York City's massive private garbage collection industry. Giovinco was a Genovese family soldier who was swept up in a major racketeering trial. He was among several reputed mobsters who were top officials in three trade groups that authorities said were used to allocate customers and exact payoffs from independent carters who competed with cartel members, according to The New York Times.

Giovinco was freed from prison in 2000.